Hypothesis The Role of Hypothalamic Phospholipid Liposomes in the Supportive Therapy of Some Manifestations of Long Covid: (ME/CFS) and Brain Fog,2023 Menichetti

I'm intrigued to know whose hypothalamus is providing the phospholipid liposomes. The paper is paywalled for me, the webpage says 'You have clicked too much', which is probably true, at least for today.

 

It's a preprint website and it tells me the same thing when I click on the link for the PDF. No idea why.

 

Googling hypothalamic phospholipid liposomes, I see they are made from the brains of cows. They appear to have been a significant thing in the 1980s with papers suggesting they be used for depression, menopause and the usual collection of other conditions subject to poorly evidenced miracle cures, that is, often poorly defined conditions without good treatments and where improvements can be difficult to be certain of.

I found one paper that was a case study of a woman who developed a horrendous prion 'mad cow'-type disease. She had taken these hypothalamic phospholipid liposomes for an extended period of time. However, it wasn't clear if the liposomes had caused her illness, as she had taken them to treat depression, which might have been an early symptom of her brain injury. Also, the people who wrote up the case study thought that these liposomes probably couldn't carry the prion disease. Reading other things, I got the impression that that might not be true, that perhaps they can.

Between the likelihood of the molecules in the liposomes being broken down during digestion into building blocks that probably many animal-derived foods could provide, and the possibility that some of the molecules don't in fact break down, and somehow cause prion disease, this is a treatment that I would go well out of my way to avoid.

A member kindly provided me access to the pdf. There are pages of hypotheses and I admit I did not approach the paper with equipoise and sufficient effort to fairly evaluate it. There's not really any data to consider.

The paper notes that a significant component of the supplement is phosphatidylserine:

Wikipedia gives a lukewarm commentary about whether ingestion of phosphatidylserine might help with dementia and the like. Importantly, it notes the issue with mad cow disease has been taken seriously: