Comment · Tue, December 10, 2019
Epicor and 22% NGF reduction
Original post in this thread
throw_my_username · 12 points
Was reading this post and got quite worried, especially since the company behind Epicor makes it sound like a good thing.
/u/MisterYouAreSoDumb you seem to advocate for this supplement a lot. Care to comment on potential implications?
Was thinking of buying some on ND but go stopped by this.
What they were answering
throw_my_username · 2 points
Any comment on the combination of epicor and lion's mane?
Lion's mane increases NGF. Epicor wants to reset it to baseline. Effectively eliminating each other.
u/MisterYouAreSoDumb
I've combined them many times. Remember, when we are talking about things like "increases BDNF and NGF" or "binds to the TrkB receptor" we are usually talking about very specific brain/body regions, not all over. So something can reduce NGF in the periphery, and that might have zero effect on levels in the brain that we actually care about. It's just like how we can't measure dopamine or serotonin in the blood and make any conclusion about how good that person feels. Those neurotransmitters play a function in very specific parts of the synapse. Serotonin in the GI tract does very different thing than serotonin in the brain. Even brain regions matter. Serotonin does different thing in the frontal cortex than it does in the hippocampus. If we oversimplify things, we lose all the context that matters. There is no evidence that Epicor has any effects on brain NGF levels, or adversely interacts in any way with things like lion's mane. It is not something I would worry about, and I certainly would not take that cited study as anything but evidence that Epicor favorably modulates NGF in pro-inflammatory scenarios.