daniel

I know this thread is ancient, but things are basically archived online forever, unless a site shuts down. I didn't want any random web searcher to get the wrong idea from this post, so I wanted to add some belated clarification to the issue brought up here. What the concerned parent did not mention is whether the amino acid test was done by checking the blood or the urine. This is an absolutely critical difference that influences the interpretation of the rest results, with each type of test being expected to contradict the other in some cases. If you're unable to break down a certain amino acid, it can accumulate in your body (and be elevated in a blood test) or it can be "wasted" (or "spilled") and will appear elevated in the urine. In either case, depending on someone's particular genetic makeup, this can lead to test results that seem counterintuitive at first. High taurine may not mean that dietary intake is too high. It may mean that the child lacks the ability to properly break down taurine. Amino acids also require certain cofactors for utilization. B6 is the most common. Vitamin C is common for some. Due to the patient's specific genetic makeup, some amino breakdown pathways may be more efficient than others. Some may require more B6 to get started. There are myriad explanations. You may see a low level of a certain amino acid and think that the patient needs to take in more of it. Not necessarily true (though it can be true). Look at your total pool of a single amino acid as a quantity totalling 100%. You may see 25% in the blood – because you only did one kind of test – and then supplement the patient with that amino to raise the level. Paradoxically, they get worse. What could be wrong? You're correcting a deficiency, right? What's wrong is that the other 75% is being spilled in the urine, because the body is incapable of efficiently breaking down that particular amino acid. Look up the biotin-related disorders, i.e. Multiple carboxylase deficiency - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia - this is a set of genetic conditions where the body is unable to effectively recycle biotin. The end result is that the pathways for leucine and isoleucine, two very important (essential) branched-chain amino acids (BCAAs), can not be completed. This leads to low levels of leucine and isoleucine in the blood, but very high levels in the urine. If you only did the blood test, you'd think that you need to feed the patient more BCAAs. You'd not only be wrong, but you'd be doing a great deal of harm. Anyway, it's worth the effort to find a doctor who knows how to interpret such tests – they are rare, usually NDs or MDs with a functional medicine background. Some normal MDs will relent to ordering such a test but they won't have a clue about how to interpret it. It's true. They will lie to your face just to save their ego. Find an empathic and licensed ND who knows what they're looking at.