Pathological Blood Coagulation: The Myxotoxic Oxidative Stress Test

Robert O. Young MSc, DSc, PhD

More than 150 years ago, British physician T. W. Jones asked the question, "Why does the blood circulating in the vessels not coagulate?" though a general answer to this question is now obvious, the biochemical mechanisms involved in how the blood coagulates (clots) are complex and varied, and all the intricacies have not yet been explained. A. Trousseau, recognized that the blood of cancer patients is in a hyper-coagulable state in the process of coagulation, even while confined in the blood vessels. The name given to this discovery is still in use today, as "Trousseau's Syndrome." Early in his career, Rudolph Virchow, the Father of Pathology, was interested in thrombosis and embolism. He speculated that intravascular blood could be altered so it would clot as a result of a stimulus too weak to clot normal blood. In 1856 Virchow delivered a lecture setting forth this concept. Although the concept of partial clotting within vessels reaches back to the beginnings of modern medicine, much of the discovery of its biochemical mechanisms - the activation of clotting factors - has been left to chance. The admission of a patient to the hospital with an unexplained bleeding disorder challenged researchers to discover the cause of hemorrhaging. Analysis of blood from normal persons helped in the study of the patient with the blood disorder. A new clotting factor was hereby discovered which was missing from the patient's blood. For this reason, several clotting factors have been named after the individuals in which they were missing: e.g., Christmas factor (factor IX), Hageman factor (factor XII)[4].In this monograph, the causes of pathological (intravascular) clotting will be described, as will various methods of detecting this condition, especially a blood test I call the Mycotoxin Oxidative Stress Test (MOST).