Do you have ongoing histamine symptoms? Maybe you have post-nasal drip, itchy skin, frequent urination, and a lot of other high histamine symptoms, and you're wondering about mast cell activation syndrome (MCAS) triggers specifically, what your MCAS trigger could be.

Reference: https://www.researchgate.net/figure/M...

In this video, we're going to look at some of the MCAS triggers. We'll break them down into two categories: the root cause kind of triggers and things that are typically going to exacerbate MCAS as well. So in this video, we're going to look at some of the mast cell activation triggers, but first a little background on this condition and these types of cells in general.

Mast cell activation syndrome (MCAS) is a condition in which a type of immune cell called the mast cell releases excessive amounts of histamine and other inflammatory substances, leading to a wide range of symptoms. These types of cells are actually found in all of our bodies, and they're situated in different tissues and areas throughout the body. Usually, they're just beneath the surface of the mucous membranes. So they're going to be in our digestive tract, in our mouth, even in our lungs and nasal passage just beneath the mucous membrane surface.

That's why many of the symptoms of MCAS or increased mast cell activation occur in some of these tissues that contain mucous membranes. Of course, not all of us have this problem with mast cell activation or MCAS. That's because our mast cells are not getting activated as easily as those with this particular condition. In addition, there's a distinction between mast cell activation and mast cell activation syndrome. The difference being mostly the severity and the systemic nature that's present, more so with MCAS, and the more localized, less systemic, less severe form would be called mast cell activation.

So it's a combination of increased susceptibility to being triggered, and there are many more environmental triggers for that person, and the triggers themselves can lead to increased susceptibility in the people with the more severe MCAS.

It is a very complex condition, and partially that's because there are so many different triggers and a wide range of symptoms that can be systemic or local. Oftentimes people think they have three, four, or even five different health issues, and it's really just this one underlying problem that's presenting this difficulty in your body and within your immune system.

So because it is so complex and multifactorial, I'm just going to cover one specific aspect, and that's MCAS triggers. So we'll break it up into two different categories. One is more of our root cause kind of trigger, and the other is exacerbating or worsening types of triggers. Before we do that, though, I just wanted to briefly describe the process of activation of mast cells as well. And the classic way that this happens is there is some kind of allergen binding to an antibody docking site on the mast cell. And that's what's depicted here. So these are kind of the docking sites and you get an antigen or some kind of protein that binds to that docking site.

So an allergen would just be one example of that, but mast cells have multiple receptors on their surface that can detect different types of stimuli, such as proteins from allergens or antigenic things, more so proteins from bugs, bacteria, pathogenic microbes, or even potentially pathogenic microbes, different toxins, and other immune-stimulating molecules.

So when that binding occurs, the cell changes in such a way that it releases the granules which contain the immune-stimulating chemicals that cause all the symptoms that we're describing. And so this is just a depiction of some of those processes. And here's the degranulation process where those internal immune-stimulating chemicals spill out into the tissues and local environment and then can also go systemic as well.

Of course, this is a really good thing in some cases when it's needed. The problem is when it becomes excessive and the immune system can't really calm it down. And when there are so many triggers going on all the time, sometimes it just becomes overwhelming to the immune system to be able to regulate this inflammatory process.

Alright, I'll put a link to this citation in the description if you want to look at this in more detail and some of the mechanisms behind mast cell degranulation.

So when looking at mast cell activation syndrome triggers, as I said, we'll break it up into root cause and exacerbating causes. So from a root cause perspective, infections like bacteria, viruses, parasites, and other pathogenic microbes can trigger these cascade of events that intend to isolate and eliminate the pathogens.