How NAC Can Help People with COMT Mutations
How NAC Can Help People with COMT Mutations—and thus help relieve anxiety, obsessions, addictions, paranoia, and much more.
Catechol-O-methyltransferase, or COMT as it’s more commonly known, is an enzyme that’s responsible for breaking down a variety of different compounds in the body. This includes things like:
Dopamine—an important neurotransmitter,
Other catecholamines—these are neurotransmitters like epinephrine and norepinephrine,
Estrogen—in particular, it breaks down harmful forms of estrogen, like 4-OH estrogen (this estrogen increases risks for cancers and other undesirable conditions).
As explained previously, some people simply have a slower baseline function of the COMT enzyme, predisposing them to higher baseline levels of dopamine, catecholamines, and estrogens.
Other people have a faster baseline function of the COMT enzyme (we’ll talk more about how to deal with a fast COMT variant in future posts).
Slower function of the COMT enzyme—which is what people are generally referring to when they mention a COMT “mutation” (which is technically incorrect)—predisposes a person, based on my clinical experience, to:
obsessions,
addictions,
excessive perfectionism,
anxiety,
paranoia,
difficulty “moving on from past traumatic events,
and more.
And, of note, this “slow” COMT variant can be especially impactful—and especially likely to cause obsessions, anxiety, addictions, and so on—when a person also has impactful genetic variants in other related gene SNPs. We’ll talk more about those in a future article.
Slow COMT function does not cause a problem for everyone who has the slow variant, but it does create the potential for issues, and that potential is especially increased when those people are undergoing life stressors, things like bad diets, hormonal imbalances, nutritional deficiencies, excessive oxidative or inflammatory damage, etc.
There are many supplements that can help people with slow COMT variants, and I’ll use one or more of them, depending on the patient’s individual needs, for the patients I work with in my clinic, but I want to talk about just one of those supplements here:
NAC.
N-acetyl cysteine, or NAC as it’s commonly known, is a modified version of the amino acid cysteine.
This cysteine occurs naturally in your body (in fact your body can produce it from the breakdown of the infamous homocysteine molecule), and it’s involved in many important processes. Of those is the production of glutathione, the body’s master antioxidant. That’s what NAC is most well-known for.
But NAC has the potential to affect many other things as well, which give it the ability to profoundly benefit people suffering from symptoms due to (or exacerbated by) slow COMT function.
NAC has been found to modulate levels of several neurotransmitters in the brain, including glutamate and the all-important dopamine neurotransmitter.
Both of these neurotransmitters are involved in the development of symptoms like those mentioned above—anxiety, obsessiveness, paranoia, etc.—and dopamine, especially, interacts with the function of the COMT enzyme.
By modulating dopamine levels, NAC has the ability to strongly counteract the effects of a slow COMT enzyme, offering many people relief from these sorts of symptoms and conditions.
NAC also can help improve COMT function by another means:
Detoxification.
NAC is highly effective at reducing levels of a variety of toxic substances in the body, including heavy metals, harmful hormones, organic pollutants, and much more. COMT also is involved in this process.
By supporting this process with NAC, you relieve some of the burden on the COMT enzyme, allowing it to function more effectively, because it no longer is swamped by the need to process out all these other harmful, toxic substances.
Clinically, I’ve found NAC to be highly effective for many people with COMT-related dysfunctions. It’s not a cure-all, and each person needs a plan that is tailored to their specific condition, but it certainly has the potential to benefit.
I’ll be writing more about COMT variants in the future, including regarding other supplements that can help and how to deal with “fast” variants.
And if you’d like to work with me one-on-one (and live in one of the US states in which I am licensed), feel free to reach out.
More coming soon…
Keep in mind that this is not official medical advice. No doctor-patient relationship is established through this article or through any other information provided on this website.
