In this retrospective database review from 23 patients with Huntington's disease (HD), 26% of patients were found to have hypocarnitenemia (low levels of L-carnitine) and catabolism (muscle breakdown). Patients with low serum carnitine who received supplementation with L-carnitine over the course of 7.3 months were found to have improvements in motor, cognitive, and behavioural measures.
The authors state, "Our findings suggest that HD patients with hypocarnitinemia may benefit from low-dose L-carnitine supplementation. Further studies of carnitine metabolism and supplementation in HD patients are warranted."
It's interesting to note that in many conditions where L-carnitine has shown promise, CoQ10 has also shown promise. The two are great complementary ingredients and the reason why many natural treatment protocols where one is used, the other is also prescribed. This is no different for Huntington's disease.
Source: Serum carnitine levels and levocarnitine supplementation in institutionalized Huntington's disease patients
Related Posts on L-carnitine:
- L-Carnitine May Reduce Inflammation in Hemodialysis Patients
- Advantages of L-carnitine in Treating Hepatitis C
- L-Carnitine May Protect Mitochondrial Function in Liver
- L-Carnitine May Reduce Oxidative Damage
- L-Carnitine Helps Treat Autism Spectrum Disorders
- L-Carnitine May Help Kids with Asthma
On a side note, and as a follow-up to the Top 10 Visiting Countries to this blog during the inaugural year, the top search terms to get to my blog were (there's a lot of repeat here--unfortunately the program keeping these stats doesn't group similar searches):
- ubiquinol and cholesterol
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I believe the studies using coq10 have used very high doses or huntington's. Should you need to take less if using ubiquinol?
ReplyDeleteTheoretically that makes sense based on multiple bioavailability studies. However, my current recommendation for those switching to ubiquinol is to stick with the same dose (as you were taking for regular CoQ10) if you can. At least until a study is done on Huntington's specifically using ubiquinol at a lower dose.
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