Top 23 Proven Health Beneits of Glycine (with references)

Top 23 Proven Health Beneits of Glycine (with references)

Some excellent information in this article.

Some of the mechanisms explained within this article lend credibility to its potential in treating Sz and provide further insight into the other health benefits one might experience.

Here’s one of the 23 bullet points that reinforces the use of of sarcosine for Sz - they’ve referenced the same pubmed entries:

  1. Glycine Helps Mental Illnesses

Glycine supplementation has been shown in one instance over the course of 5 years to significantly reduce symptoms of OCD and body dysmorphic disorder (R).

Glycine has positive results when used in the treatment of obsessive-compulsive disorder in adults (R).

Glycine supplementation significantly reduced symptoms of schizophrenia (R).

In treatment-resistant schizophrenia glycine improved cognitive and depressive symptoms (dosed at 0.8g/kg).

Interestingly, the group who made the most improvement were also the most deficient in glycine (R).

Glycine helps in chronic schizophrenia by increasing NMDA-receptor-mediated neurotransmission (R).

This effect on NMDA-receptor-mediated neurotransmission allows for glycine to work synergistically with schizophrenia medication (R).

3 Likes

what is it? never heard about this glycine

You might be more familiar with it being referred to as sarcosine. :slight_smile:

Sarcosine, also known as N-methylglycine, is an intermediate and byproduct in glycine synthesis and degradation.

I tried l-glycine when I was off meds and it didn’t do much for me.

Edit: http://m.iherb.com/Solgar-Glycine-500-mg-100-Veggie-Caps/15193

It is possible that without meds, the symptoms were simply too much for you to perceive any benefits. It’s possible that glycine is not something you were deficient in at the time or it could just be that your NMDA neurotransmitter functions are not rendered dysfunctional as a result of glycine metabolism issues. Physiology is so individual that it astounds me how accepted it is that modern first world medical frameworks are so general in nature.

People who eat chicken/bone broth regularly would be getting more glycine from their diet than you were from that supplement.

Have you tried sarcosine? It is not really being promoted as effective as an isolated treatment for Sz, but as an adjunct to medications that address the positive symptoms.

1 Like

Have you tried sarcosine?

No, there’s a tenuous prostrate cancer link, so that put me off.

I just speed-read a few pubmed publications … from what I understood, it seems that serum-sarcosine levels could serve as a useful bio-marker or “warning sign” that might help medical professionals identify prostate cancer in patients presenting with symptoms.

I could see no evidence implicating sarcosine as contributing to predisposition or increasing probability of developing prostate cancer.

I’ll read properly when I’m not so tired. I also hope that what I just wrote makes sense.

1 Like

Yeah, it’s a tenuous link, but enough for me.

Yeah I re-read one of the publications. I’m not saying “forget-about-it!” or anything. Just that from what I can discern, the data does not conclude that sarcosine is causal. It is just found to be elevated in patients who have been confirmed to have prostate cancer already.

I will seriously have to read again another time to properly understand the mechanisms through which the cancer facilitates this result, as there is a possibility that the link goes two ways, but certainly that is not the “take home” jist of the publications I just skimmed over.

So what you’re saying is you don’t want prostate cancer? Common! :stuck_out_tongue:

Seriously though, if you are into prostate health (this is already a stupid sentence and represents the fact that I am over-tired), you should research the phenomena known as “injaculation”. Who ever said that only Yin could heal!

My brother tried TMG to help with his OCD, and it somehow ended up helping his paranoia.
TMG (trimethylglycine) promotes optimal neurotransmitter function, improves the methyl cycle by acting as a methyl donor, which is essential to normal cell health and function, involved Serotonin and Dopamine production, and helps to offset OCD.
TMG increases the body’s natural production of SAMe which can help reduce depression, in some cases.
When TMG gives up a methyl group, it leaves a compound called dimethylglycine which is a B-complex vitamin.
Without enough TMG, biosynthesis can slow down, telomeres can shorten, and genetic errors, also called transcription errors, multiply, and health is definitely worse.

1 Like

You’ve done some homework, sir. :slight_smile:

For someone to benefit measurably by TMG supplementation, one must first have genetic expressions negatively interfering with homeostasis. Naturally this is inferred when one has Sz, but the complexity of DNA and gene expression makes it an act of futility to generalise. Amino acids and other metabolites that support methylation are not adaptogenic, so no two people will respond exactly the same, even if they both have Sz.

If you are not neurotypical, you have one or more faults in your methylation pathways. Guaranteed. However, to infer from this generalisation anything specific at all is just an exercise of futility.

I would recommend to everyone to jump on 23andme and begin the journey into the specifics. In fact, if everyone on this forum did so, the genetic pool in their database would become significantly more valuable and serve to potentiate research into Sz. Even that alone is a motivator (for me at least). And I’m Autistic, so I’m not so easily motivated by humanitarian objectives :smiley:

1 Like

Um…any homework I’ve done looks like chicken scratch compared to what you just said.
I completely agree, generalizing is almost an act of futility, but considering it can help some with sz, it doesn’t hurt to try it to see if it helps - which is what I did, and it helped.
23andme is especially cool if you’re into genealogy.

I completely agree - and I encourage it (assuming general good health, of course). I think what I’m trying to say is that one should not be discouraged when they note that another person with Sz responded poorly or not at all. And that the only way to predict with any certainty whether or not one will respond positively is with a thorough genomic analysis supported by other data points such as pathology and medication history etc.

If one is capable of following a controlled dosing regime and making log entries routinely, one can self-assess and draw reasonable conclusions alone. And it’s worth adding that one ought to consider repeating the experiment periodically, even if the initial results appeared disheartening, as physiology is not completely static.

I have heard of positive responses of sz to B6 and Omega 3, but my brother’s sz was made worse by both, so I took him off those. I also tested B3, B8, and B12 and found he significantly improved (to say the least) with each of these.

The common denominator between deficiencies in B3, B8 and B12 is GABAgernic dysfunction, which comes as no surprise in a Sz pathology. :slight_smile:

After almost 3 years of working on balancing my brother on vitamins, I’m almost there.
I’ve balanced him on B8, B12, TMG, and he will hopefully be balanced on B3 in a month or two.
(B3 needs are bouncing up and down where the others all came down directly to an equilibrium).
My plan is that once he’s fully balanced with no sz symptoms whatsoever, and on a full “pleasure pill” as we call it, then I’ll let him sit there for 2 to 3 weeks to stabilize before we start to very slowly start lowering meds.
I calculated it should take about 2.5 months to drop all the meds, if we don’t have any unforeseen issues.
So maybe in about 4 or 5 months he should be completely off meds and have no more sz symptoms.
We’ll see what happens and how far down that road we actually get.

I got sidetracked, but I had written in an edit:

Supplementing B6 will only help if there is a B6 defficiency (of course), but pyridoxine can become harmful quite quickly compared to the other B vitamins.

What did you observe as the negative effects resulting from Omega 3 supplementation? Was he on any anti-coagulant drugs at the time? I think it is highly unlikely that O3 supplementation could do anything worse than nothing at all, except in cases where significant vasodialation is already present. I suppose there are some intricate ratio-based relationships that could be disrupted …

Regarding B3, have you tried Xanthinol Nicotinate or Picamilon?

Curiously, these nootropics operate fundamentally as vasodialators - I only just joined the dots. This suggests to me that the omega 3 results you perceived could possibly be bogus. It might be worth another trial.

Just bare in mind that anything concerning the human brain is always more complicated than we think. Always.

A deficiency might be improved by supplementation, but the core issue could be far more deep rooted and complicated, such as an SNP polymorphism that prevents the nutrient from being metabolised properly somewhere in the chain.

I would never encourage anyone to view supplementation as an absolute solution to Sz, particularly where positive symptoms are concerned. Tread with caution, my friend.

1 Like