Continuing Professional Development (CPD) approved by the CPD Certification Service (CPD UK), the British Association for Nutrition and Lifestyle Medicine (BANT) and the Nutritional Therapists of Ireland (NTOI).

Webinar description:

Autophagy is the core mechanism by which cells keep themselves functioning, by eliminating viruses, amyloid, damaged organelles, and inflammatory components that are assembled into structures called inflammasomes. The balance between autophagy and inflammasome assembly is a crucial determinant of most disease processes. This balance can be influenced using nutritional strategies. Vitamin D status, the ability to activate vitamin D, and cytokines generated based on T cell phenotypic expression play key roles in determining whether autophagy or inflammasome assembly will win out, with decisive consequences across virtually all diseases.

Most patients in functional medicine practice have patterns of chronic illness that include a failure of autophagy and upregulation of inflammasome assembly. The consequences of this imbalance include chronic inflammation and failure to kill pathogens, so the patients are paradoxically too inflamed but still not getting the pathogen-killing effect that upregulated inflammation should provide. This pattern is self-reinforcing.

We will explore the core fundamentals of vitamin D function, differences between renal and non-renal conversion, D activation, how to evaluate whether vitamin D receptors are working, how D functional status and autophagy are impacted by T cell polarization, and how D contributes to the profile of whether cortisol receptors are working (ever see a patient whose 24 hour cortisol is high, but they’re still very inflamed?).

As usual, you’ll help the majority of people if you know the core elements of the process. You don’t need to master all of what we discuss in this lecture to recognize some key patterns and to have a repertoire of high-value tools that you can use to help lots of people.