Professor W Kostler

Glutadione Peroxidase and Selenium

The glutadione peroxidase is detoxifying peroxides to water and glutadione. We try to improve the scavenging activity by applying selenium. There is a correlation between the level of glutadione peroxidases in the blood and the plasma selenium. A study was made in the US, on AIDS patients and patients with AIDS related complexes, using a control group. A direct correlation was found between the plasma selenium level and glutadione peroxidase activity in the blood. It is very important to supply this selenium, because glutadione peroxidase is one of the most effective scavengers.

Excessive intake of selenium (2,000 to 5,000 micrograms a day) is said to produce poisoning. But it is not true in a way - we know that women m Venezuela take 5,000 micrograms a day and don't suffer from breast cancer. The optimal intake is in comparison to the sub-optimal intake- sub-optimal means 50 to 200 micrograms a day and optimal intake is 250 to 300 per day. Optimal means you have some reserve, for example, for radiotherapy or chemotherapy, with agents that activate radicals in your body.

The normal level of selenium should be 80 to 130 micrograms per litre of blood. We check the levels of selenium in different cancer patients at their first consultation in our office - most of them suffer from a big deficiency in selenium. One patient had a level of 49 micrograms-a very low level in a person with advanced bladder cancer.

Effects of Mercury in Dental Amalgam

1 want to emphasise that there is a very strong interaction between some trace elements, and I'll focus on mercury and selenium. A surplus of mercury causes a diminution of selenium. Why is that important?

Most of our cancer patients have a lot of amalgam dental fillings. 1 remember a study we made few years ago at the University of Vienna. One group of students with amalgam fillings had to chew a chewing gum for twenty minutes, and the other group had to drink hot lemon juice for twenty minutes. We wanted to know what happens with the mercury level in their blood. By chewing the gum, with dental fillings of amalgam, or by drinking hot and acid juices, there was always a big mercury intake in the blood.

In the same way, the level of selenium was lowered, because a lot of selenium was needed to detoxify the mercury to mercury Selenite, and therefore it was not available any longer. What we didn't expect was that the immune status showed us a small decrease in the immune-competent cells after this test-after 20 minutes of chewing gum or drinking hot juice

Therefore, we usually try to remove the dental fillings made out of amalgam, and use chelation therapy to bring out the mercury, leaving the selenium free for the glutadione peroxidase activity again. Such a patient can have normal mercury levels in the blood, but after the injection DMPS there is a large amount of mercury over the next 24 hours, going out with the urine. The mercury is deposited in the brain and the central nervous system, mostly in the hypophysis, and causes a lot of problems with hormonal regulation.