I have to say I was already suspicious because lots of pwp consider him either a savior or a quack. But I looked into his claims.
He published a study https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3068871/ about one patient who showed great improvement on his amino acid protocol - but
#1, it was only one patient,
#2, it was NOT a clinical trial,
#3 all conflicts of interest are supposed to be identified up front so you can evaluate whether there are any biases.
#1 - you need many patients to see if something works. There's one.
#2 - you need a clinical trial of a treatment, carefully set up so that you are really testing both the safety and the effectiveness of the treatment. You want to compare the proposed treatment with no treatment and you want a double blind so neither patients nor doctors know who is taking what (so you can see if there is a placebo effect, and if treatment is better than no treatment, and also so that biases don't get in the way.)
#3 - turns out that Marty sells the supplement that he's testing (no, now it's his daughter who sells it) and that he owns the "independent lab" that tested for "success." How independent can it be, exactly?
Um. Fail on all three measures.
Any followup studies? No. Hmm. Wouldn't it make sense to do a test with multiple patients? It's not that hard if it's a tablet to set it up with a placebo for the no-treatment condition. Wasn't done. And virtually the only person who quotes him in subsequent studies is... Marty Hinz.
What about the efficacy of the compounds he talks about? Let's look on Pubmed to see what research there is.
Tryptophan and serotonin are low in PD, but their actions are complex and subtle, so "just add more" is not the obvious next move. The only article that I could find about tryptophan supplementation is https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/?term=tryptophan+supplement%2C+parkinsons+treatment and it's an article about probiotics.
Tyrosine - it's well known that tyrosine supplements can interfere with dopamine absorption, so why add it here? For example, see: https://www.sciencedirect.com/topics/neuroscience/tyrosine and https://www.rxlist.com/tyrosine/supplements.htm#Interactions
5-HDP – the only study in the last 40 + years with this supplement has to do with addressing dyskinesia in rats. Supplementation to improve PD in humans, um, no. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/24004632
Sulfur amino acids - when I search on this in Pubmed I get studies about NAC, which is deficient in PD patients, and supplements are widely available in places like Amazon.com. I even tried NAC, but it makes my low blood pressure worse, so not using it any more. (Other than the blood pressure I didn't notice anything else.)
What does he claim on his website?
According to one of his websites, http://amino-acid-therapy.com/neurotransmitters/imbalances-cause-disease-symptoms/ ALL of these conditions are from neurotransmitter imbalance, but he can treat them all
Sorry, whenever I hear that the same problem causes lots and lots of conditions (pre-menstrual syndrome, cravings, depression, ADHD, PD, addiction...), but this treatment works, I grab my wallet and run.
If you still want more about Dr. Hinz, go to see this post on Quackwatch:
https://www.quackwatch.org/11Ind/hinz.html
Snake oil.
Image of duck from Pixabay.
This is disappointing as my brother-in-law has been swearing by this regimen and does, in fact, seem enormously healthier than he did before undertaking it. Anecdotal, but a very powerful anecdote. Still, I suspect, after reading the negatives, his recovery was, after all, just an anomalous remission.
ReplyDeleteHinz claimed for years that his methods were supported by 20 papers published in medical journals. But a few weeks ago, Dove Press retracted 14 of them, and the est are still under review. See https://retractionwatch.com/category/by-publisher/dove-press/
ReplyDeleteThe other six articles were retracted in 2021.
ReplyDelete