Fascinating. I wonder if there will soon be a way to culture your mitochondria externally in order to give you extra, maybe it could help with diseases like chronic fatigue.
Beyond athletic performance and chronic fatigue, some neurologists and psychiatrists have recently suggested that every mental disorder (literally, the entire DSM) has a single underlying cause: mitochondrial dysfunction. If that's true, mitochondria transplants could solve the mental health crisis.
Read it earlier this year and I agree. Also, he's all over various podcasts and youtube channels if you'd rather watch.
What I got out of the book was two things:
* Mitochondria are freaking cool.
* The DSM is bollocks and metabolic dysfunction explains all mental illness.
Despite how radical the above sounds, the evidence for it is overwhelming. The book is largely an accessible tour of the evidence. It's well cited without being too academic.
And while Dr. Palmer is a prominent spokesperson for this movement, there are hundreds of other neurologists, psychiatrists and doctors on the same line.
Doesn't sound like getting them into every cell in the body would be easy. If delivering a package with genes into every cell in the body was easy, viruses would be happy, figuratively speaking.
I just mapped mine, for what it's worth. A bit odd to have the whole 16000-something base pairs stored on my computer.
We have viruses in animals that reproduce using the mitochondria already, but don’t exclusively target the mitochondria. I believed these were categorized as mitoviruses but I was mistaken.
I used family tree dna. Not really much in the way of guarantees on data privacy as you'd expect (at least not from a software developer's perspective), but I figure it's challenging enough to abuse knowledge of my exact mitochondrial haplogroup, that if someone can do that, they can do worse anyway.
"Well, eet's no use crying over speeled mitochondria..." --Ren Höek
I don't think every mental health issue is traceable to mitochondrial dysfunction. But I'm pretty sure it's implicated in cardiovascular disease. Malfunctioning mitochondria can make your arteries more prone to inflammation which leads to greater lipid deposits. I even read somewhere (sorry, can't cite rn) that a major component of arterial plaques is bits of dead mitochondria.
Dr Casey Means has a thought provoking book on this subject Good Energy. It’s about how cell metabolic dysfunction could be implicated in a wide range of health conditions.
Why transplant? Mitochondria are constantly fusing and fissioning. Wouldn't it be better to provide mitochondria with a more comfortable environment to ensure they fission?
It seems like yet another misunderstanding of a series of complex problems by promising a simple one-stop solution. Maybe it'll work for some things, but it's also making claims that something like PTSD can be sorted out via a mitochondria flush, which doesn't make any sense to me.
Maybe that would help, but the claim is that mitochondrial dysfunction is the source of every "literally, the entire DSM" mental disorder, and that is an unbelievable claim, especially when the DSM runs the gamut from PTSD to Erectile Dysfunction to Caffeine Withdrawal. It says to me that it's a poorly considered claim.
"Evidence suggests that alterations in mitochondrial morphology, brain energy metabolism, and mitochondrial enzyme activity may be involved in the pathophysiology of different neuropsychiatric disorders"
Dr. Chris Palmer's book "Brain Energy" is a good introduction to the body of research. Dozens of pages of citations, you can judge for yourself how well-considered they are. - "Mitochondrial dysfunction has been found in a wide range of diagnoses that include pretty much every symptom found in psychiatry".
"Pretty much every symptom" is not going hard enough. There has yet to be a single psychiatric symptom that isn't theoretically and empirically linked to metabolic dysfunction. The only symptoms he left out were the ones which have no published research!
Yes, I still believe that saying it will cure every single condition in the DSM is a poorly considered claim. I am in no way qualified to evaluate every study, nor do I have access to them, but the fact that there are a lot of persuasive pop science books about it makes me more dubious, not less.
All I can think of right now is mental illness being caused by mitochondrial dysfunction and Parasite Eve. With the way the 21st century has been going to far, spontaneous human combustion would just seem like par for the course.
There are some supplements that seem to cause an increase in mitochondria in the body, but if you are not deficient in mitochondria I think they won't do much good for you.
Maybe the first half of the book, the second half sells her company’s services really hard, very much aimed at customizing for each patient and staving off common American health problems. She has some tests not in the standard blood screens she thinks should be in there to give you personalized nutrition advice, she does reference Robert Lustig’s work and research a lot in first half.
Do all these things, cultivate meaningful relationships, avoid anxiety and drug abuse and you’ll be well on your way to becoming an optimal version of yourself.
Sadly not. That mostly just covers your body and emotional well-being. You have to nurture your mind as well, which is beyond the scope of my pithy aphorisms.
Which had to do with watching live mitos exchange their insides. Specifically, to watch this process, you load your mitos with photoactivatable fluorophores, then use a laser to tag some which changes say your green emitting protein to red. Then you follow the color changed particles being exchanged between mitos. Same mechanism probably used here to watch cells swap mitos. Oh, and this has to be done with live cells.
Very cool stuff, mitos are so important to metabolism and more I hope we see mitohacking, as mentioned by perrygeo. A much safer performance enhancer when it's your own mitos.
This could be a mechanism for future intracellular repair. Build little repair robots that look like mitochondria, have them insert into cells, do their magic, then leave.
Or you could occasionally fast for 5-7 days to dramatically ramp up the intensity of autophagy/mitophagy in order to have your body do this for you. No robots needed. You may also discover that you like the way your brain and body operate with a different ketone/glucose energy balance.
Not trying to persuade you to try again, but if you ever desire to, electrolyte deficiency (particularly potassium) is a common reason that people experience headaches or cramps when fasting or starting ketogenic diets. Watch out for sugar in commercial electrolyte tablets though!
Low blood sugar and dehydration can lead to all kinds of unpleasant side effects. When I tried to fast for the first time, I was an idiot and didn't supplement with water or electrolytes and I suffered crippling cramps.
It would be much easier to package those into extracellular vesicles (exosomes or microvesicles) than into mitochondrial-like vehicles.
That has been an active area of research for a fairly long time (decades), and there are already clinical applications that have been commercialized (eg.: mRNA vaccines packaged in lipid particles).
Can't say I'm a fan of a prestigious scientific outlet adopting clickbait style headlines. This is the second one from the same place on the front page right now.
I did my MSc (biochem) on freeMitos and mitoMPs in a cancer immunology context, and I'm not really seeing the clickbaitiness here. The text seems totally reasonable.
You need to realize you're reading editorial content, and not a review or research paper.
It's possible that clickbait is technically the wrong term but it's a pattern that I strongly associate with those practices. It's an idiocracy-esque development. Learning that it has spread to the likes of Nature is saddening.
I posted the article here, and I had a fairly similar reaction to yours.
I was tempted to remove the "What does this mean for our health?" part of the title, but I thought that such a large edit might be against HN policy / too much editorializing on my part.
In any case, I thought the article was worth posting because it's a nice intro to a area of recent progress in biology that not a lot of folks are aware of.
Fascinating. I wonder if there will soon be a way to culture your mitochondria externally in order to give you extra, maybe it could help with diseases like chronic fatigue.
Mitochondria doping! People are already thinking how to use it for sports performance. https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2025/02/14/new-doping-trick...
Beyond athletic performance and chronic fatigue, some neurologists and psychiatrists have recently suggested that every mental disorder (literally, the entire DSM) has a single underlying cause: mitochondrial dysfunction. If that's true, mitochondria transplants could solve the mental health crisis.
https://www.sir.advancedleadership.harvard.edu/articles/brai...
Ugh, it might be true, but hits all the self-help scam stereotypes, and breathless paradigm-revolution science journalism stereotypes.
> suggested that every mental disorder (literally, the entire DSM) has a single underlying cause: mitochondrial dysfunction
On this topic, Brain Energy by Christopher Palmer: https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/61129785-brain-energy . Very interesting book, highest recommendation.
Read it earlier this year and I agree. Also, he's all over various podcasts and youtube channels if you'd rather watch.
What I got out of the book was two things:
* Mitochondria are freaking cool.
* The DSM is bollocks and metabolic dysfunction explains all mental illness.
Despite how radical the above sounds, the evidence for it is overwhelming. The book is largely an accessible tour of the evidence. It's well cited without being too academic.
And while Dr. Palmer is a prominent spokesperson for this movement, there are hundreds of other neurologists, psychiatrists and doctors on the same line.
it's a fascinating read however I believe most psychiatric disorders are traced not to the mitochondrion organelle, but rather, the midichlorians
äye zännz ä dystürrbnännz in ze forrz
Doesn't sound like getting them into every cell in the body would be easy. If delivering a package with genes into every cell in the body was easy, viruses would be happy, figuratively speaking.
I just mapped mine, for what it's worth. A bit odd to have the whole 16000-something base pairs stored on my computer.
We already have mitoviruses, it stands to reason they they might adapt to infect mitochondria that are being delivered to cells.
We haven't found any mitoviruses in animals, yet, at least?
1: https://virology.ws/2019/03/28/viruses-that-infect-mitochond...
We have viruses in animals that reproduce using the mitochondria already, but don’t exclusively target the mitochondria. I believed these were categorized as mitoviruses but I was mistaken.
How did you get that (and what guarantees on data privacy?)
I’d be very interested
I used family tree dna. Not really much in the way of guarantees on data privacy as you'd expect (at least not from a software developer's perspective), but I figure it's challenging enough to abuse knowledge of my exact mitochondrial haplogroup, that if someone can do that, they can do worse anyway.
>Doesn't sound like getting them into every cell would be easy
>Viruses would be happy
As a programmer, I sometimes wondered at the value proposition of certain antiviral drugs, especially the ones that interfere with replication.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Antiviral_drug#Reverse_transcr...
"Well, eet's no use crying over speeled mitochondria..." --Ren Höek
I don't think every mental health issue is traceable to mitochondrial dysfunction. But I'm pretty sure it's implicated in cardiovascular disease. Malfunctioning mitochondria can make your arteries more prone to inflammation which leads to greater lipid deposits. I even read somewhere (sorry, can't cite rn) that a major component of arterial plaques is bits of dead mitochondria.
Dr Casey Means has a thought provoking book on this subject Good Energy. It’s about how cell metabolic dysfunction could be implicated in a wide range of health conditions.
Why transplant? Mitochondria are constantly fusing and fissioning. Wouldn't it be better to provide mitochondria with a more comfortable environment to ensure they fission?
Off the top of my head, I would imagine transplanting gives more control over the end result.
Re mental health - this is extremely interesting if it turns out to be correct. Thanks for sharing
It seems like yet another misunderstanding of a series of complex problems by promising a simple one-stop solution. Maybe it'll work for some things, but it's also making claims that something like PTSD can be sorted out via a mitochondria flush, which doesn't make any sense to me.
You'd be aiding in one-half of the issue though (environment/internal).
Maybe that would help, but the claim is that mitochondrial dysfunction is the source of every "literally, the entire DSM" mental disorder, and that is an unbelievable claim, especially when the DSM runs the gamut from PTSD to Erectile Dysfunction to Caffeine Withdrawal. It says to me that it's a poorly considered claim.
You sound very certain of yourself. Yet you cite no evidence at all except your gut feeling. Let's review these so-called "poorly considered claims":
(2014) https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/24845118/
"Evidence suggests that alterations in mitochondrial morphology, brain energy metabolism, and mitochondrial enzyme activity may be involved in the pathophysiology of different neuropsychiatric disorders"
(2021) https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC8291901/
"we provide a focused narrative review of the currently available evidence supporting the involvement of mitochondrial dysfunction in mood disorders"
(2022) https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/36181925/
"Increasing experimental evidence supports a role for mitochondrial dysfunctions in neuropsychiatric disorders. "
(2024) https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S01497...
"We summarize the existing literature on mitochondrial dynamics perturbations in psychiatric disorders/neuropsychiatric phenotypes"
While psychology today ain't a scientific journal, they provide an excellent summary, providing that evidence is both widespread and well known. https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/the-therapy-center/2...
Dr. Chris Palmer's book "Brain Energy" is a good introduction to the body of research. Dozens of pages of citations, you can judge for yourself how well-considered they are. - "Mitochondrial dysfunction has been found in a wide range of diagnoses that include pretty much every symptom found in psychiatry".
"Pretty much every symptom" is not going hard enough. There has yet to be a single psychiatric symptom that isn't theoretically and empirically linked to metabolic dysfunction. The only symptoms he left out were the ones which have no published research!
And finally, just this week Forbes had a feature about it. Again, not a sci journal but there's enough interest to name it the "quiet revolution underway in psychiatry". https://www.forbes.com/sites/jessepines/2025/04/05/could-mit...
---
Do you still feel that the metabolic theory of mental illness is an unbelievable claim, poorly considered?
It may not be THE only answer. But at the very least, this theory is well supported with decades of research and deserves serious consideration.
Yes, I still believe that saying it will cure every single condition in the DSM is a poorly considered claim. I am in no way qualified to evaluate every study, nor do I have access to them, but the fact that there are a lot of persuasive pop science books about it makes me more dubious, not less.
All I can think of right now is mental illness being caused by mitochondrial dysfunction and Parasite Eve. With the way the 21st century has been going to far, spontaneous human combustion would just seem like par for the course.
Several implicit suggestions are made in the article, but I guess the largest application of externally cultivated mitochondria would be to aging.
Here is an article about this (future) technology:
https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC5511681/
There are some supplements that seem to cause an increase in mitochondria in the body, but if you are not deficient in mitochondria I think they won't do much good for you.
This is what Matrix Bio wants to do, in fact! https://mitrix.bio/
"The goal is to produce bioreactor-grown mitochondria on an industrial scale, sufficient to supplement every person over the age of 55"
Although it might be preferential to get, say, properly genotyped mitochondria from champion horses!
Interesting -- you can keep mitochondria alive outside of cells? Are there papers on what they need for that?
In the meantime, read Good Energy to learn how to care for your mitochondria.
TLDR?
Edit: The key suggestions, according to a bot and condensed by me:
- Eat healthy.
- Sleep healthy.
- Exercise healthy.
- Try Intermittent Fasting to promote autophagy / mitophagy.
Maybe the first half of the book, the second half sells her company’s services really hard, very much aimed at customizing for each patient and staving off common American health problems. She has some tests not in the standard blood screens she thinks should be in there to give you personalized nutrition advice, she does reference Robert Lustig’s work and research a lot in first half.
Do all these things, cultivate meaningful relationships, avoid anxiety and drug abuse and you’ll be well on your way to becoming an optimal version of yourself.
Oh is that all?
Sadly not. That mostly just covers your body and emotional well-being. You have to nurture your mind as well, which is beyond the scope of my pithy aphorisms.
There's a novel, video game and film: Parasite Eve.
We stan a mito story! My old lab discovered some of what we called "kiss and run" dynamics: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kiss-and-run_fusion
Which had to do with watching live mitos exchange their insides. Specifically, to watch this process, you load your mitos with photoactivatable fluorophores, then use a laser to tag some which changes say your green emitting protein to red. Then you follow the color changed particles being exchanged between mitos. Same mechanism probably used here to watch cells swap mitos. Oh, and this has to be done with live cells.
Very cool stuff, mitos are so important to metabolism and more I hope we see mitohacking, as mentioned by perrygeo. A much safer performance enhancer when it's your own mitos.
https://umdf.org/ Great organization working on Mitochondrial diseases. I have a family member with a diagnosed Mito disease.
This could be a mechanism for future intracellular repair. Build little repair robots that look like mitochondria, have them insert into cells, do their magic, then leave.
Or you could occasionally fast for 5-7 days to dramatically ramp up the intensity of autophagy/mitophagy in order to have your body do this for you. No robots needed. You may also discover that you like the way your brain and body operate with a different ketone/glucose energy balance.
Any significant amount of fasting is a quick way to get some very unpleasant headaches for me. No thank you.
Not trying to persuade you to try again, but if you ever desire to, electrolyte deficiency (particularly potassium) is a common reason that people experience headaches or cramps when fasting or starting ketogenic diets. Watch out for sugar in commercial electrolyte tablets though!
Low blood sugar and dehydration can lead to all kinds of unpleasant side effects. When I tried to fast for the first time, I was an idiot and didn't supplement with water or electrolytes and I suffered crippling cramps.
Low magnesium? I was having serious muscle cramps and found Mg supplements were highly effective.
"do their magic" seems like it's hiding a lot of complexity.
Very much so.
It would be much easier to package those into extracellular vesicles (exosomes or microvesicles) than into mitochondrial-like vehicles.
That has been an active area of research for a fairly long time (decades), and there are already clinical applications that have been commercialized (eg.: mRNA vaccines packaged in lipid particles).
Can't say I'm a fan of a prestigious scientific outlet adopting clickbait style headlines. This is the second one from the same place on the front page right now.
I did my MSc (biochem) on freeMitos and mitoMPs in a cancer immunology context, and I'm not really seeing the clickbaitiness here. The text seems totally reasonable.
You need to realize you're reading editorial content, and not a review or research paper.
The clickbait is the "What does it mean?" format.
"Researchers are trying to work out why."
"Here's what 4k researchers think."
It's possible that clickbait is technically the wrong term but it's a pattern that I strongly associate with those practices. It's an idiocracy-esque development. Learning that it has spread to the likes of Nature is saddening.
I posted the article here, and I had a fairly similar reaction to yours.
I was tempted to remove the "What does this mean for our health?" part of the title, but I thought that such a large edit might be against HN policy / too much editorializing on my part.
In any case, I thought the article was worth posting because it's a nice intro to a area of recent progress in biology that not a lot of folks are aware of.
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