Iodine and Potassium Iodide

In a paper published online in the journal Brain Stimulation, a team of researchers led by University of Wisconsin-Madison biomedical engineers Kip Ludwig and Justin Williams demonstrated that stimulating the cervical vagus nerve in the neck increased the penetration of cerebrospinal fluid in the brain. That’s evidence, the authors note, of an increased flow of fluid through the brain’s clearance systems, carrying with it waste products and misfolded proteins.

Those misfolded proteins, of course, are known to collect and strangle off neurons in a host of neurodegenerative diseases.

“It’s a completely new paradigm that might explain existing vagus nerve stimulation effects for epilepsy and depression, but it’s also a completely untapped mechanism,” says Ludwig, an associate professor of biomedical engineering and neurological surgery. “The hope is that we can start looking at hijacking the nervous system to prevent diseases like Alzheimer’s and Parkinson’s from ever occurring.”

The researchers used a fluorescent tracer to track the cerebrospinal fluid (CSF) of mice that were stimulated with an implanted cervical vagus nerve cuff. The fluid moves through the brain’s glymphatic system, one of two complementary clearance systems discovered by researchers since 2012 that are believed to play crucial roles in maintaining homeostasis in our brains.

“In that system, you can imagine sort of a pipeline,” says Kevin Cheng (PhDBME ’16), an assistant scientist in the Department of Biomedical Engineering and co-first author on the paper along with assistant researcher Sarah Brodnick. “You have CSF flowing into the brain, and as it flows in, it collects extracellular molecules like toxic byproducts, metabolic byproducts, and then flushes that out toward the paravenous drainage. So by measuring CSF entering, we are, in effect, measuring that flow.”

By employing an implanted cuff electrode and stimulation parameters—length, intensity and frequency—that are both already approved for clinical use by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration, Ludwig says the group can now quickly move on to imaging brains of patients to confirm the effect in humans.

“We can literally go test this in the clinic in the next year,” says Ludwig, who is also the neuroengineering lead for UW-Madison’s Grainger Institute for Engineering.

Ultimately, Ludwig aims to connect the research to his group’s work on an injectable electrode—the “injectrode”—to explore potential preventative treatments for neurodegenerative diseases through minimally invasive means.

“What we’re trying to do is create something that we can do before all these proteins have aggregated into plaques,” he says. “But to do that, we need to get to something that can be really minimally invasive. If you’re going to do it to prevent someone from ever getting Alzheimer’s disease or Parkinson’s disease, you need to get to something that’s trivially invasive.”


Eiriu Eolas is trivially invasive. But can it help get iodine into the brain?

Papers:

 
1. The purpose of the experiments reported here on dogs was to study the rates and amounts of bromide, iodide and thiocyanate passing from the serum into the cerebrospinal fluid and from the cerebrospinal fluid into the serum.

2. After intravenous injections these ions begin to pass promptly into the cerebrospinal fluid, drawn from the cisterna magna. The maximum passage from the serum to the cerebrospinal fluid requires 7 hours or more at which time there is a constant ratio between the serum and the cerebrospinal fluid. Subsequently, as the serum level falls, the serum/CSF quotient rises. The passage of these ions into the cerebrospinal fluid differs from their passage into transudates and most other tissue fluids in two respects; (a) the cerebrospinal fluid concentration never reaches that of the serum; (b) the rate of passage is slower.

3. The difference in the passage of bromide, iodide and thiocyanate into the cerebrospinal fluid and other body fluids is most strikingly shown by the threshold figures. The cerebrospinal fluid may contain no iodide or thiocyanate at a time when the serum contains measurable quantities. In other words the serum must attain a certain minimum concentration of iodide or thiocyanate before these ions pass into the cerebrospinal fluid. The bromide may also have a threshold value, but if so it is much lower than the threshold value for the others. It follows that with low concentrations in serum the difference between the individual passage of bromide, iodide and thiocyanate into the cerebrospinal fluid is much more pronounced than with large doses. The above facts bring out sharply the selective capacity of the barrier between serum and central nervous system.

4. In the passage from the cerebrospinal fluid into the circulation no appreciable difference is seen between the ions. When injected into the cistern they all pass out quickly at the same rate. There is thus no evidence of any barrier regulating their passage from cerebrospinal fluid to blood.


1. Even when a steady level of (131)I(-) is maintained in the blood for long periods, the uptake by brain and spinal cord is very small, and the possibility that this is due to an active transport of I(-) from brain-tissue to blood has been examined.

2. Most of the phenomena, however, can be explained on the basis of a slow passive diffusion across the blood-brain barrier associated with an active transport of (131)I(-) out of the c.s.f. across the choroid plexuses, so that, except possibly for the spinal cord, active transport from central nervous parenchyma into the blood need not be postulated. If it does occur, it contributes very little to the net exchanges between the three compartments, plasma, c.s.f. and extracellular fluid.

3. The steady-state distribution of bromide between plasma and c.s.f. is normally such that the concentration in the c.s.f. is only some 70% of that in plasma; it has been shown that this is most probably due to an active transport of Br(-) across the choroid plexuses.

 
In Table 1 you can see the whole-body distribution after intravenous administration of astatine, a halogen element with similar chemical properties to iodine: https://jnm.snmjournals.org/content/60/9/1301/tab-figures-data

Ascorbic acid increased the uptake into the thyroid, but not into the brain, which is like iodine very low.

Here you can see that iodine reaches maximum values in the brain in a first few hours, while in thyroid it takes about 18 hours:

 
Respiration enhances the flow of cerebrospinal fluid into the brain.

 
In winter time I have problems with muscle pains, because my body don't produce enough heat in some parts of body. When I go outdoor, and it's very cold, I start to feel pain. I put one drop of Lugol's iodine on my skin and the area close to the muscle start to be worm again, but only for short time. When I use tincture of iodine, the body starts to produce heat for very long. Supplementation throughout skin has many benefits. I wonder is it possible to sniff tincture of iodine as a form of supplementation?
 
I managed to find a full interview with DR Flechas from this website, using the webarchive. On that website, the second hour was missing. I made a transcript of an interview and this is the part that was most interesting to me because I think it explains some of my experiences that I couldn't confirm through any other source that I could find.

And it turns out that for those people who have polycystic ovaries, one of the medical problems that these girls have is a problem of diabetes. And so we've treated them with 50 milligrams of iodine. And by the way, the iodine we used was developed in the 1850s, 1840s, right in there, by a guy by the name of Dr. Lugol. And many of you know it as Lugol's solution. And Lugol's is a combination of iodine and the salt of iodine called potassium iodide. And so Lugol's is a combination of both iodine and iodide. And it turns out that there are tissues in the body that have preferences for iodine. And so you will find that the stomach prefers iodine. Breast tissue prefers iodine and iodide, the salt. Thyroid tissue prefers the use of strictly iodide. And you have tissues like the prostate that prefer the iodide, and it just keeps on going. So we find that you need to have both types of iodine, not just iodine, but you also need iodide. To try to say that you need one or the other is incorrect.

Now, back to the girls with the polycystic ovaries. We would give them this combination of Lugol's solution in a tablet called iodorol. And in the process of doing so, we noticed that these girls were coming back and telling us that their problems with diabetes got better. And so I had a patient that came in, and she was an overweight lady, probably about 320-pounder, who came in and had abnormal blood sugar. Well, she came in through the emergency room with a blood sugar of 1,380. That's a blood sugar that can kill people. You know, a normal blood sugar shouldn't be above 100. This lady was 1,380. And we put her on insulin, and then we asked her to come back and see me in the office in about two weeks. And when she was in the office, I sat there and said, you know, while you were there in the hospital, we put you on insulin, and I noticed that you had fibrocystic breast disease. And so here's some articles showing us that if you take iodine, that helps to calm them down. She said, yeah, these things are so painful just before my periods, and it would be nice to have some comfort here. So we placed her on the Lugol, or the Iodorol, 50 milligram per day. And we also instructed her and taught her how to use a glucometer. She came back and said, now, if you have any problems, you know, give me a call.

She calls up about a week later, and she says, you know, I'm starting to experience problems with hypoglycemia while I'm taking insulin, and I said, oh, that's interesting. I said, well, why don't you just lower the total amount of insulin so that you don't have hypoglycemia? Well, she comes in a month later to the office, and she has her glucometer with all the blood sugar readings for the last month. We download everything, and her average blood sugar for the whole month was 98. Well, I looked at the lady, and I said, you know, this is really good. You are exercising really good. She was walking like an hour twice a day. And, in fact, exercising muscle does not need insulin to lower blood sugars. Exercising muscle can absorb sugar directly from the bloodstream without the use of insulin. And so she was, but I thought, you know, this woman, she's, you know, six weeks ago, she had a blood sugar of 1,380. I mean, that's an incredible number. Anybody who's got that gets put on insulin, period.

And so I told her, I said, you know, you're doing so good with your diet, you're doing so good with your exercise program, and so on, and you're doing so good with your insulin. And she says, oh, didn't I tell you that I stopped taking insulin four weeks ago? I said, wait a minute. I never gave you instructions to stop taking insulin. She said, sure you did. She said that I could keep lowering my insulin as long as I kept having problems with hypoglycemia. And she sat there and said, I kept having hypoglycemia until I stopped taking insulin. She said, once I came off insulin, my blood sugars have been okay.

And I said, let's find out about this. And so she'd been off of insulin for four weeks and had an average sugar of 98. Well, I said, well, this may be just a fluke or who knows what. So I said, let's just keep watching your blood sugars two times a day. Stay with your diet and your exercise program. We'll see you back in a month. Brought her back in a month later. Her average blood sugar was 93. She continued to be taking the iodine. And it was at that point that we finally figured out that, you know, that what we had seen with the patients with the polycystic gobrys in the sense of better blood sugar control, we actually had a live diabetic here who was actually much improved and virtually normal in the presence of taking iodine without having to take any more insulin.

Well, we did some research, and it turns out that there was an anesthesiologist out of Australia by the name of Dr. Klu, who published and showed that the receptors of the all-hormone receptors in the human body have an amino acid called tyrosine. And tyrosine is what the body attaches iodine to. And it turns out that there is an enzyme in the breast called lactoperoxidase. It's the enzyme that allows for the breast to attach iodine to the milk in the mother. Well, that enzyme turns out that it can go anywhere it wants to in the whole body. And the enzyme has the ability to attach iodine to tyrosine anywhere it finds it in the body. Having said that, what happened is that we have now seen people who have problems with, well, the other thing that I need to say is that every receptor, once iodine attaches to the receptor, the receptor upregulates its ability to recognize the hormone that's supposed to attach to the receptor.

Now, let's look at diabetes. Ninety percent of diabetics have plenty of insulin. They are not insulin-deprived. They have insulin. They have what they call insulin-resistant diabetes, and that is the receptors for insulin do not recognize the presence of insulin. And it turns out that what the iodine was doing was it was increasing the sensitivity of the receptor for the insulin that was out there.

We've seen the same situation for patients with testosterone, like we've had women who come into the office and have virtually no sex drive. We give them 5, 10, 15, 50, 100 milligrams of testosterone, and finally they have a sex drive. And we've watched these girls carefully over the years, and they didn't develop any problems with hirsutism or any other male-developing features, no worsening of their voice or anything, while taking the testosterone. But then all of a sudden, in the presence of, you know, and the average male makes about 100 milligrams of testosterone a day. The average female makes about 2.5 to 5 milligrams of testosterone a day. Well, what ended up happening is that, and these were patients that had been on high doses of testosterone for probably the last 2 or 3 years and hadn't had any problems with 100 milligrams a day. We started them on the iodine, and within 2 or 3 weeks, all of a sudden these patients came back in and said, my sex drive is driving me crazy. And I sat there and said, wait a minute. You've been on this stuff for years now, and it hasn't done that to you. And they sat there and said, well, it sure is now. And it turns out that it all started, again, when we placed the patient on iodine.

And we've seen this happen with growth, well, some hormones that control ovarian function called FSH and LH. One of the things that we know about a developed and aging ovary is that the ovary becomes resistant to the stimulation of the ovary with these two hormones. And all of a sudden, with starting to take iodine, we've seen women who stopped having periods at age 38 start having periods again. And, I mean, these were women who had stopped having periods for at least a whole year who started taking iodine, and all of a sudden they started having periods again. And we're talking about every 28 days, and that's still true five years later. They're still having periods every 28 days. So, and, you know, it just keeps on going. What we're finding is that iodine has a tremendous amount of benefits to the body.

(...)

Well, it turns out that the thyroid receptors, the receptors inside the body, are needing iodine, because when you put iodine on the thyroid hormone receptor, the thyroid hormone, the receptor increases its sensitivity to the presence of the hormone, and all of a sudden these symptoms disappear.

(...)

And also, iodine is being used like up inside the brain tissue. Iodine helps to increase mental activity, mental cognition. Like we said, every hormone in the body, the receptors for those hormones are dependent upon iodine. And when the iodine gets attached to the receptor, the receptors increase their sensitivity to the hormone that's supposed to attach to it. Having said that, think about all the neurohormones that are present inside the brain.

And the brain tissue has an active transport mechanism for pumping iodine into brain tissue. It's almost like the same thing, the same transport mechanism for absorbing iodine into the thyroid tissue is active and present in the brain tissue. And iodine helps to increase your sensitivity to the receptors for serotonin, for dopamine, for GABA, all these hormones that are running around governing your day-to-day operations of how you feel and your emotions. And iodine helps to increase the sensitivity. So we're finding people who are coming back and sitting there saying, you know, my depression lifted the day I started taking iodine. Within a few days, I was feeling so much better. I mean, we're seeing people out there who've got problems with their hormones, and especially, you know, mental function. And we're finding that iodine helps to improve on that very quickly, and people feel so much better.

 
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