Mold
A Discussion About Mold and Mold Exposure with Dr. Bruce Hoffman
We discuss how mold and mold exposure can be a trigger for Chronic Inflammatory Response Syndrome (CIRS), and Mast Cell Activation Syndrome (MCAS). We discuss ways to investigate and determine if you have been exposed to mold and what you should do if you suspect mold exposure is affecting your overall health.
To learn more about mold treatment, prevention, and recommendations, visit the Mold Illness section of our Hoffman Centre website.
A Discussion About Mold and Mold Exposure with Dr. Bruce Hoffman
I wanted to talk a bit about mold and mold exposure as a potential cause for chronic ill health. Mold is ubiquitous and, without question, many people are suffering from the effects of mold. Mold triggers Mast Cell Activation Syndrome (MCAS), and many people are suffering from that, which is why I feel that it has to be part of a differential diagnosis for chronic ill health.
It’s shocking how many people have mold exposure as a trigger and as an ongoing mediator, keeping them in an inflamed state resulting in Chronic Inflammatory Response Syndrome or CIRS. There is a 34-page article on my website describing the diagnosis and treatment of mold illness or CIRS.
I would recommend the following steps to people who feel they have mold exposure.
Do the CIRS questionnaire found on page 9 of the aforementioned article. You can see if you fulfill the criteria for the potential diagnosis of mold illness. Some of those symptoms are not just for mold illness. Some are more psychiatric based questions that can arise from mold. So, the questionnaire itself isn’t enough but it’s a good start. If you have more than eight symptoms in more than six of the subtypes on the questionnaire, consider mold as a potential differential diagnosis.
The second thing you can do is a visual contrast test. This too can be googled. Dr. Shoemaker’s website has access to a computerized VCS test. Take the test and if you fail it, consider mold as a potential illness or reason for feeling unwell.
Then, of course, the most important consideration is exposure. If you know that you’ve got a basement full of mold or your bathroom or your bedroom has mold on the windows from condensation, you have to consider that in your differential.
Not everybody gets sick from mold. Some people simply get allergy type symptoms, but some people get true inflammatory response illness (CIRS). It’s been estimated that only 25% of people will have significant illness from mold. However, in my experience it’s more than that. People often downplay how important mold and the mycotoxins produced by mold are in influencing your health.
So, what is important? Your exposure and your history. Is what you are exposed to visible mold? If it’s not visible, it could be hidden and so you often have to do your own homework and call in a mold inspector to look for the potential sources of mold. So, what can you do to potentially identify a problem? Look up at your pot lights. Is there a brown ring around your pot lights? Do you have buckled baseboards? Do you have black mold on your window frames? Is there mold in the grout in your shower? Do you have a front-end loading washing machine that smells musty? Does your house smell musty? Is there any potential mold in your air-conditioning system? Do you have a food composter in your kitchen? Because a lot of mold grows there. If you aren’t sure, it’s important that you call in a mold inspector, someone who will do a visual inspection and is armed with specific tools such as an infrared camera. Someone who is able to actually measure the dryness or wetness of drywall and put a small hole through drywall if you suspect mold or moisture behind the wall. The inspector will begin the examination of your home in the attic, looking at the insulation and at the condensation potential. Is your upstairs attic vented? A lot of the homes that we built in the Calgary building boom in 2009-2010, including my own by the way, didn’t have venting. Condensation and wetness were ubiquitous and many people didn’t discover the mold until many years later, so get a good visual inspection. Find somebody to come in and inspect from the attic to the basement, someone who goes inside and outside and looks in multiple areas. If you go online, you’ll see how to do a visual inspection and a lot of it you can do yourself.
Then you want somebody to do what’s called an ERMI test, which is a mold spore count. You want to do it either through a vacuum collecting dust from carpets or a swiffer cloth collecting dust off the floors. We recommend living rooms and bedrooms first. Some people do it in the basements although it’s not often recommended because a lot of basements are moldy. In my personal experience it’s important to know if your basement is moldy because through your furnace you’ll be pulling in mold through the furnace and pushing it throughout the house. Molds have also traveled from the basement through convection currents when your home heats up and so if the basement is a source, you want to know exactly how bad it is.
Once you’ve done the visual inspection, once you’ve done ERMI testing looking for mold spores, once you’ve found mold (or not), the next step in the diagnosis is to do what we call the cytokine testing. Those aren’t done in Canadian labs, so we have to send them out. We call them the Shoemaker panel and we measure things like C4a, TGF Beta-1, MMP-9, VEGF, MSH and we do a nasal swab for something called MARCoNS, a coagulase negative staph. Basically, it’s a staph that lives in your nasal passages. It doesn’t produce overt nasal symptoms but can have significant cognitive effects and mitochondrial effects on your symptoms. So, we do those inflammatory markers.
Recent advances have been very controversial regarding the use of urinary mycotoxin testing. In the original workup by Dr. Shoemaker didn’t believe that urea mycotoxin testing had any role to play in the diagnosis of mold illness. He has personally moved on to transcriptomic testing for definitive diagnosis but many other clinicians do urine mycotoxin testing to determine if there are any toxic mycotoxins of mold in the urine. This is used quite extensively by the breakaway group that doesn’t adhere strictly to the Shoemaker protocol. There are two schools, which are the Shoemaker purists and then the group that has broken away. Like any good movement, there are always two camps, we can’t get away from that. Support and challenge exists throughout nature, exists throughout medicine, exists throughout clinical diagnosis and treatment.
So, if you have a symptom profile that was suggested by the questionnaire, if you have a positive VCS test, if you have any signs of mold in your home, if the testing for mold spores in your home is positive, if your urine mycotoxin tests are positive and your Shoemaker labs are very positive, it’s highly likely that mold is playing a role in your illness. You need to find a practitioner who knows how to treat it. The treatment is extensive, requires lots of steps, and has to be followed in a specific sequence otherwise you can overload the detox pathways and get into increased symptom expression and feeling worse, not better.
