Genetic Testing for Autophagy

GX Sciences offers an autophagy panel that evaluates 11 gene variants for possible SNPs and complications. You may be feeding your body the correct nutrients, but they are useless if your body’s cells can’t absorb them properly. An autophagy genetic test is one of the only ways to know whether your internal cellular recycling system is intact. Autophagy is necessary to maintain cellular health and assist in preventing the growth of malicious cells. The genetic testing GX Sciences offers can help you identify how your body works, as well as nutrients and supplements that would be specifically beneficial to you.The report algorithms, created by our medical experts, will take the patient's genetic results and create nutritional and lifestyle recommendations along with recommended lab work and health precautions based upon many factors and their clinical expertise. The built-in proprietary software, SNP Genius, takes out the guess work and allows the provider to recommend the proper nutrition and health advisements safely by a patient's DNA results.

What is Autophagy? Listen Now To Dr. Stewart Explain on his latest podcast.

What is Autophagy?

Autophagy is a natural physiological process that occurs to counteract the destruction of cells in the body. The term “autophagy” comes from the Greek words auto, meaning self, and phagy, meaning eating. Like spring cleaning for the body, the self-eating process accumulates dead or senescent organelles and proteins, isolates them, dissolves what no longer serves the body, and recycles the remaining amino acids to be utilized elsewhere. Autophagy is particularly important for cells that cannot regenerate easily and need to have long lifespans like cells in the kidney, liver, and pancreas. It’s crucial to overall health as it greatly helps in maintaining homeostasis.

What Role Does Autophagy Play In Diseases?

When autophagy is disrupted, a buildup of dead, senescent, or even toxic organelles and proteins form. Cancer, autoimmune diseases, and neurological diseases like alzheimer’s, dementia, parkinson’s, ALS, and multiple sclerosis have been tied to increased mTOR activity.
mTOR (mammalian target of rapamycin) regulates cellular processes like growth, generation, survival, and autophagy. It also perceives energy levels, so when a cell is stressed or nutrient deprived, mTOR increases autophagy to find amino acids to fuel the body. If mTOR is overactive, autophagy is usually bypassed to prioritize other activities, leading to an increase of buildup of byproducts.
Some studies suggest that overactive mTOR activity is associated with decreased life span. Without autophagy, cells undergo more stress, function less effectively, leading to quicker cell aging. Decreasing TOR activity can aid the upregulation of autophagy, clearing cells of dysfunctional or dead cellular elements.

How to Stimulate Autophagy

The innovative autophagy research of the last few years enables the scientific community and health care providers to reevaluate how they treat patients and what can improve with these new findings. Some known natural autophagy stimulators are exercise, fasting, and high fat, low carb, low protein diets. Exercise and 12 - 16 hours fasting can naturally stress cells into creating more energy through recycling existing amino acids in the cell by organically encouraging autophagy to kickstart. High fat, low carb, low protein diets can encourage less mTOR activity, allowing for autophagy to take place. mTOR inhibitors, a class of drugs that target mTOR, can also stimulate autophagy. These prescribed drugs like Rapamycin (sirolimus) may help those too ill to adopt natural stimulus or that need extra help because they effectively suppress the immune system in high doses, allowing mTOR activity to slow down and encourage autophagy to take place. It’s important to have your autophagy activity tested before starting a prescribed mTOR inhibitors as they can suppress a healthy immune system, possibly leading to more health issues.*