Blog share: SARDS and Pet Health, part 1

01/31/12 - Below is a blog post I'm sharing from The Healthy Pet Network.  Original post appears here:  http://healthypetnetwork.net/?p=1857#more-1857, which is worth visiting to watch the embedded video of the black lab, Gator, who was diagnosed with SARDS.



SARDS – Sudden Acquired Retinal Degeneration Syndrome, appears to be an auto-immune disease that leads to blindness. It stems from a hormonal antibody imbalance that allows a deregulated immune system to lose its protective functions, thus allowing the system to also lose recognition of its own tissue and turn against the body which causes tissue destruction.


This occurs, due to either a deficiency in cortisol, or the production of a defective cortisol. When this happens, excess sex hormones are produced by the inner layer of the adrenal cortex. I personally believe that the offending hormone is total estrogen. The other sex hormone called androgen, can be transformed into more estrogen, due to an enzyme in the fatty tissue called Aromatase. This has been documented in humans but not with animals. More studies are currently being done.


The excess in total estrogen not only binds the thyroid hormone but deregulates the immune system and compromises antibody production. This is how SARDS seems to occur. Anti-antibodies are thought to be produced against the retinal tissue causing blindness.


The shame of this is, by the time the loss of sight in the pet is noticed by the owner, subsequent identification and treatment, generally cannot correct the permanent retinal damage, but there is certainly hope in stopping further auto-immune diseases from occurring, including cancer.


Michigan State and Cornell Schools of Veterinary Medicine are looking into this disease. It is also an important subject if interest for the Healthy Pet Network.


Finally, they are exploring its connection to the syndrome that I discovered 35 years ago. I call it Atypical Cortisol Imbalance Syndrome ( ACIS ), but people still refer to it, as Plechner’s syndrome.


I have been in practice for almost 50 years, trying to find a better way to help my patients. My hope is that academia with all the knowledge and tools and grants available to them, will consider my syndrome and really define it in a much more scientific manner.


After 35 years, it just might be happening. Please tell me why it has taken so long to help a patient?


Yours in Health,


Dr. AL Plechner




**My note - my personal feeling (based only on my research and opinion, as I mentioned here http://sardsdog.blogspot.com/2011/08/sards-resources.html) is that SARDS is not an auto-immune disease as stated in the top paragraph of the blog post above.  There have been two studies published in 2006 that showed that anti-retinal autoantibodies were not present in SARDS canines (one referenced here:) http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/16634935

Clearly further research must be done to definitively prove this, but I believe IMR is an autoimmune disease, while SARDS is not.  The line of thought to which I subscribe is Caroline Levin's stance that low cortisol and increased total estrogen leads cells (including retinal cells) to uptake too much calcium and cause cytotoxicity by destroying the mitochondria within cells.  This leads to a sort of  retinal "seizure", which prevents the retina from getting signals through to the brain.  Caroline explains this much more eloquently than I do here:  http://www.petcarebooks.com/SARDS/FAQs.htm#15

This excess retinal calcium is addressed by Levin's SARDS protocol by supplementing magnesium and adenosine (magnesium is an antagonist of calcium...which means magnesium helps to block the action of calcium in cells).