Leucomethylene Blue For Covid And Other Respiratory Infections — Regular Oxidized M.B. Is Dangerous

R J

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Hope the title got your attention. I’m not making the claim, the authors of this paper are (in context of acute and very serious infection):

The Application of a Reduced Dye Used in Orthopedics as a Novel Treatment against Coronavirus (COVID-19): A Suggested Therapeutic Protocol

These researchers suggest an IV cocktail of the clear leucomethylene blue reduced by vitamin C, as well as urea (the reason they include it is interesting), and a glutathione supportive antioxidant like NAC or lipoic acid. They are quite clear about why NOT to use regular oxidized M.B.:

Key Points
1. Never ever use Methylene blue (the oxidized form) for treatment of COVID-19, since it increases oxidative stress and consequently inflammation.

2. The reduced form of methylene blue (Leucomethylene) should be used for treatment.

So I’m not an expert on antioxidant/oxidants, but it seems like regular M.B. can be risky in status of high inflammation like cytokine storm with acute infection. Damaged / dead cells don’t reduce M.B. to leucomethylene blue and in a state of high oxidative stress the extra burden of using the oxidized M.B. form can be a bad idea.

This seems to fit with my experience. When I gave someone high doses of M.B. when dealing with tail end of respiratory infection, it noticeably increased their congestion and discomfort. I think this had something to do with increased oxidative stress in an already high inflammation state, and some sort of serotonin cascade as a result.

The above paper advocating Leucomethylene blue contrasts the reccomendation of this doctor Treatment for COVID-19 using Methylene Blue , who advocates regular MB nebulization for covid prevention and post treatment.

I wonder if a nebuluzed solution containing leucomethylene blue and dehydroascorbic acid will be better for treating respiratory infection? The addition of NAC as a nebulized mucolytic could help break up mucus and get the solution deeper into lung as well to extert purported animicrobial and anti-inflammatory effect. I’m not sure how much the oxidized vs reduced state of M.B. changes the potential antimicrobial, antiviral effect.
 
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R J

R J

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@haidut Care to comment on this bearing in mind Oxidal??

I don’t think that supplement is meant for treating serious infections. There’s big difference between using M.B. as a mitochondrial energy supplement or nootropic or whatever in a healthy person vs treating major lung infection in someone dealing already with massive oxidative stress.
 
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I don’t think that supplement is meant for treating serious infections. There’s big difference between using M.B. as a mitochondrial energy supplement or nootropic or whatever in a healthy person vs treating major lung infection in someone dealing already with massive oxidative stress.
Yes, I know, still want Haidut's opinion as he is smart!
 
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R J

R J

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Yes, I know, still want Haidut's opinion as he is smart!

While I look forward to addition of anyone’s learned opinion, it must get annoying being constantly tagged in posts.

It is also a good idea to start building a base of knowledge so you can rely on yourself, too. If you are interested in understanding it more I would start with learning about oxidative and reductive states. It’s a subject which I’m looking into myself to better understand.

Anyways, some of M.B. antiviral effect is probably from the oxidative effect on microbes. Wether it’s better to use M.B. or the reduced form depends on the patient. In a really bad infection with high inflammatory cytokines it might be a bad idea to use the regular M.B.. In that case L.M.B. probably still has some antimicrobial effect and the benefit of being anti-inflammatory.

Depends how you take it too. Orally ingesting M.B. will give some other tissues time to reduce it, nebulizing M.B. straight into an already inflammation ridden infected lung means theres less healthy tissue there to reduce it so the oxidative stress burden is higher. It totally depends on the case I think.
 
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jb116

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It's a clear distinction that Peat has made before about substances that increase oxidation and are thereby actual anti-oxidants by keeping the system running and free radicals down. Their definition of anti-oxidant is exactly what peat says not to supplant with or increase dramatically in the body. That use of the word anti-oxidant actually entails reducing oxidation. Peat is against this. The idea of sickness and health is twisted out there. Any stress that any good substance does indeed create is due to lack of resources, sugar, etc. I wouldn't dose thyroid for example if I were one to eat hypo-calorically.
 
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R J

R J

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It's a clear distinction that Peat has made before about substances that increase oxidation and are thereby actual anti-oxidants by keeping the system running and free radicals down. Their definition of anti-oxidant is exactly what peat says not to supplant with or increase dramatically in the body. That use of the word anti-oxidant actually entails reducing oxidation. Peat is against this. The idea of sickness and health is twisted out there. Any stress that any good substance does indeed create is due to lack of resources, sugar, etc. I wouldn't dose thyroid for example if I were one to eat hypo-calorically.

The linked article and commentary I made is about treating lung infections and preventing further inflammatory cytokines when there is already risk of cytokine storm. Context matters in use of substances and manipulating oxidative/reductive status. I’m not sure applying general health measures like avoiding reduced substances makes sense in acute healthcare like this post and study linked is about. It comes down to the patient. I get that this is the ray peat forum but that doesn’t mean we can’t explore more specific topics that fall outside subject of general overall health in non-acutely ill people.

Your comment about oxidants and lack of resources backs up the context of what I’m saying. By saying that, you basically concisely repeated the subject of the paper and agreed with the basic assumption of why to avoid oxidants in a stressed state. I’m not sure that giving acutely ill people sugar goes far enough. You can notice in the paper they mention using a dextrose solution, anyways.


And the common conception of antioxidant/oxidant is just as you are inferring. “Their” conception of antioxidant and oxidant in this paper is actually more correct than how you are saying or how common medicine refers to it. Current science doesn’t really use the term more specifically when speaking about hormetic “antioxidants” vs. direct antioxidants. They assume you’ll read the paper and make the distinctions yourself despite the interchanging terms. Something like sulforaphane is not an antioxidant but has a hormetic effect after it interacts with the body. Same with polyphenols and stuff like alpha lipoic acid and ubiquinone iirc . They’re still often lumped in under common parlance with glutathione or ubiquinol etc under the heading antioxidant.
 
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haidut

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@haidut Care to comment on this bearing in mind Oxidal??

Well, here is something that should address the pro-inflammatory claims.
Methylene Blue Is A Potent Anti-inflammatory, With Possibly The Broadest Spectrum

As far as leucomethylene blue and methylene blue - they constantly re-cycle one through the other, as do most other quinones. That is the role of all those redox modulators, they carry electrons - first they accept them and in the process get reduced themselves (so methylene blue becomes leucomethylene blue) and then they donate them (to oxygen or to one of the ETC complexes, wherever the electron flow blockage happens to be) and the cycle repeats on and on and on. To say that using leucomethylene blue is safe but methylene blue is not is strange to me as within seconds of getting the reduced form into the body it will get oxidized back to methylene blue. It's like saying that using Ubiquinol (reduced form of CoQ10) is safe but using Ubiquinone (oxidized form CoQ10) is dangerous. They are both useful, available as products, and used clinically but starting with the oxidized version may be a bit better if the organism is already in a reduced state. Both leucomethylene blue and methylene blue can cause oxidative stress if used in the massive doses typically used to treat shock in hospitals (4mg/kg-5mg/kg IV, usually as a single dose), but in the doses used in humans orally (5mg-15mg daily for an adult) for chronic diseases like depression, psychosis, MELAS, etc I don't think there a risk of causing oxidative stress.
The protocol they propose is a combo of oxidized MB and vitamin C, already known to be useful for viral infections and even cancer. If you search the forum you will find many other threads on the topic. There is even an FDA-approved drug for cancer called Apatone, which used vitamin C and another quinone (vitamin K3) to achieve the same result as what is described in this study.
The Apatone® Development Project — IC-MedTech

Anyways, back to the study in this thread. The vitamin C will reduce MB and turn it into leucomethylene blue and vitamin C will become dehydroascorbic acid (oxidized form of vitamin C) and that is actually what has anti-viral effects. The MB is added as an oxidizing agent, so same principle as Apatone, where the oxidizing agent is vitamin K3. However, once the mixture is given through IV (as they propose) the leucomethylene blue will quickly become MB again. The part that is really interesting is that they say leucomethylene blue does not cause oxidative stress but they included NAC (an antioxidant/reductant) to the cocktail. Why, if leucomethylene blue is safe? I suspect they know quite well that the high dose (1mg/kg ) of MB/leucomethylene they propose is likely to cause oxidative stress no matter what form (reduced or oxidized) it is administered, so to play it safe they add NAC to the cocktail. If leucomethylene blue was indeed safe in such high doses then there would have been no need for a powerful reductant like NAC.
 
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R J

R J

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I emailed them for clarification on their reasoning for claiming LMB will cause less oxidative stress. Hopefully they respond.

It honestly sounds more appropriate for nebulization. LMB applied directly to inflamed lung tissue seems more reasonable when taking their claim about less oxidative stress as a result of using the reduced form into account, although it kind of makes my brain hurt to try to think about the switching from oxidative to reductive status back and forth and also tying in pharmacokinetics.

DHAA and NAC can both work as mucolytic when nebulized as well.
 
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Well, here is something that should address the pro-inflammatory claims.
Methylene Blue Is A Potent Anti-inflammatory, With Possibly The Broadest Spectrum

To say that using leucomethylene blue is safe but methylene blue is not is strange to me as within seconds of getting the reduced form into the body it will get oxidized back to methylene blue. They are both useful, available as products, and used clinically but starting with the oxidized version may be a bit better if the organism is already in a reduced state. Both leucomethylene blue and methylene blue can cause oxidative stress if used in the massive doses typically used to treat shock in hospitals (4mg/kg-5mg/kg IV, usually as a single dose), but in the doses used in humans orally (5mg-15mg daily for an adult) for chronic diseases like depression, psychosis, MELAS, etc I don't think there a risk of causing oxidative stress.
The protocol they propose is a combo of oxidized MB and vitamin C, already known to be useful for viral infections and even cancer. If you search the forum you will find many other threads on the topic. There is even an FDA-approved drug for cancer called Apatone, which used vitamin C and another quinone (vitamin K3) to achieve the same result as what is described in this study.

Haidut, I really, really appreciate you are on this forum, without which this forum would be very much the poorer :D
 

rei

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Consumed methylene blue will have same reaction in stomach acid as with vitamin c, one would think. So the difference in effect would come from the few molecules of hydrochloric acid that is neutralized in the process, no?
 

Amazoniac

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R J said:

"[..]at first MB should be reduced to LMB (a lipophilic substance), then it could penetrate into the cells."​

?

- Role of Methylene Blue in Trauma, Neuroprotection and Neuropsychiatric Diseases

"MB is the oxidized form of blue color and water soluble, while leuco-MB is the reduced form, uncharged, colorless, and lipophilic [18,19]. Biochemically, MB has a high water solubility, low toxicity, with the ability to penetrate cellular membranes, and to cross the blood-brain barrier (BBB), even at low doses administration."​

??

Leeuco, meethy, leny, blue..
 
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Broken man

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Hope the title got your attention. I’m not making the claim, the authors of this paper are (in context of acute and very serious infection):

The Application of a Reduced Dye Used in Orthopedics as a Novel Treatment against Coronavirus (COVID-19): A Suggested Therapeutic Protocol

These researchers suggest an IV cocktail of the clear leucomethylene blue reduced by vitamin C, as well as urea (the reason they include it is interesting), and a glutathione supportive antioxidant like NAC or lipoic acid. They are quite clear about why NOT to use regular oxidized M.B.:



So I’m not an expert on antioxidant/oxidants, but it seems like regular M.B. can be risky in status of high inflammation like cytokine storm with acute infection. Damaged / dead cells don’t reduce M.B. to leucomethylene blue and in a state of high oxidative stress the extra burden of using the oxidized M.B. form can be a bad idea.

This seems to fit with my experience. When I gave someone high doses of M.B. when dealing with tail end of respiratory infection, it noticeably increased their congestion and discomfort. I think this had something to do with increased oxidative stress in an already high inflammation state, and some sort of serotonin cascade as a result.

The above paper advocating Leucomethylene blue contrasts the reccomendation of this doctor Treatment for COVID-19 using Methylene Blue , who advocates regular MB nebulization for covid prevention and post treatment.

I wonder if a nebuluzed solution containing leucomethylene blue and dehydroascorbic acid will be better for treating respiratory infection? The addition of NAC as a nebulized mucolytic could help break up mucus and get the solution deeper into lung as well to extert purported animicrobial and anti-inflammatory effect. I’m not sure how much the oxidized vs reduced state of M.B. changes the potential antimicrobial, antiviral effect.
Do what you think is the best but this is totally bull**** for me. MB is used for sepsis which is high inflammation state, it can kill you. Its used for other conditions at hospitals without problems, there is number of studies saying its safe and some people that are part of one fb group are using 100 mg + of regular methylene blue for years to take care of Bartonella infection and its starting to be used for lyme aswell.. Truth is even Ray Peat is not fan of higher doses of MB, I mean higher than 1 mg and he warned me not to go for sunlight when taking MB but I know from my experience like other that are using it that taking MB and going to sunlight is the best feeling ever :)
 

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