As Clinical Associate Professor of Medicine at the University of Washington and a private rheumatologist in Renton for 20 years, Dr. Andrew Holman was able to help define a new concept in medicine called immuno-autonomics: How stress flares immune activity.
Find Dr. Holman’s Slide Deck here.
In rheumatoid arthritis (RA), Seattle-based Inmedix validated stress as the primary reason immunosuppressive treatments fail.
Inmedix suspects it could to do the same for COVID-19: assess and control how fight-or-flight stress drives the disease to cytokine storm, acute respiratory distress syndrome (ARDS), ventilator support and death. More important, mitigating fight-or-flight stress in COVID-19 might reduce the overwhelming immune activation, just as it did in untreatable rheumatoid arthritis.
Dr. Holman told us that “It comes down to stress.” There is a growing body of evidence that stress has a big impact on health–particularly with regard to immune system regulation and the treatment of of autoimmune disease. Some of these stress reactions are hard wired into humans.
Increased stress seems to weaken treatment and is often the primary reason that treatment fails in patients.
Dr. Holman’s company, Inmedix is developing very sensitive tests that measure the heart rates. These tests measure beat-to-beat changes. These changes are indications of the impact of stress. The new technology is able to measure these changes accurately to 1/1000 of a second. The goal is replace blood testing–in some cases–with math–and greatly improved the treatment of disease.
Notes From Hal Beals:
Scientific data shows that stress is strongly linked to autoimmune diseases like Rheumatoid Arthritis, Psoriatic Arthritis, Lupus and Fibromyalgia.
Dr. Holman’s research is to measure the biochemistry of stress to predict therapy effectiveness through his company-Immedix. Today there is evidence that Heart Rate Variability is associated with stress which triggers the well known “flight or fight” responses that increases stress. The brain can trigger this response in1/1000 second. The average heartbeat takes 1/2 a second. But useful measurements of Heart Rate Variability, measurements must be accurate to 1/1000 second. Immedix is getting close to this level of accuracy.
75% of patients with autoimmune diseases do not improve with standard treatments. Dr. Homan believes that with more accurate measurement of stress levels, more effective drug treatment, combined with changes in diet, exercise, sleep and meditation will reduce stress and greatly improve the quality of life for patients. And new research indicates that stress is related to certain cancers.