Should You Take Boswellia If You Have Slow COMT?

Jul 15

What Boswellia Does Mechanistically

Boswellia is derived from the resin of a tree that's common through certain parts of Asia and Africa. People commonly use it for inflammatory issues, but I'm going to try to address whether this herb has any use and or harm for people with slow COMT variants specifically.

Let's first talk about the mechanisms.

Boswellia has four main known mechanisms, some of which are tangentially related to slow COMT function. Firstly, it blocks 5-LOX, which is an enzyme involved in the inflammatory cascade—a series of molecules produced from one another in the body that, when dysregulated, can contribute to systemic inflammation, i.e. inflammation throughout the entire body. By blocking this enzyme, Boswellia has the potential to help lower systemic inflammation.

Secondly, Boswellia helps to lower cytokines, which are signaling molecules, i.e. these are little chemicals that the cells of your body secrete in order to tell other cells in your body certain information. In this case, these cytokines are communicating “damage” to the cells of your body, which again, when dysregulated, can contribute to systemic inflammation.

Boswellia also helps upregulate certain antioxidant pathways in the body. Specifically, it activates something called NRF2, which increases the levels of superoxide dismutase, catalase, etc., which help essentially expunge oxidative molecules—i.e. what I might call electron sponges—from the body.

It has neuroprotective effects, namely in that it inhibits glutamate-induced neurotoxicity and reduces the overactivity of NMDA, all of which can cause the nerve cells to be damaged due to overactivation.

Functional Interactions Between Boswellia and Slow COMT

Why It CAN BE a Good Match

…

The rest of this article is available exclusively to Slow COMT Roadmap members. Your first month of the Roadmap is FREE.

A note from Dr. Malek:

If you’re interested in helping support my work, the best thing you can do is help share my website. Consider linking my blog posts on your social media pages, reddit forums, etc. It’s not easy competing with multimillion-dollar healthcare behemoths, so your help in amplifying a relatively small voice really goes a long way. Thank you :)

~Dr. Malek

Keep in mind that this is not official medical advice. No doctor-patient relationship is established through this article or through any other information provided on this website.

Malek Hamed, MD

MTHFRSolve is my brainchild.

I’m an IFM-trained Functional Medicine physician with experience solving a wide variety of disorders still seen as mysterious by the modern medical paradigm.

I love solving those mysterious problems.

But doing so—I’ve found—requires two things that are, unfortunately, much too rare in our times: Authenticity and Depth.

MTHFRSolve is my way of giving you a little bit of that.