In reading about the kidneys’ production of dopamine, I came to realize that they produce dopamine from circulating levodopa; they do not produce their own levodopa. Where does all that levodopa come from I thought? It turns out that the mesenteric organs produce a large net amount of circulating levodopa.
https://academic.oup.com/jcem/article/82/11/3864/2866142
Just like with your sinemet, or mucuna, or fava, some of that levodopa is throttled before it would reaches the brain.
I thought I’d try to make a diagram of all this.
In the diagram below I put a throttle symbol to represent that some levodopa is removed before it reaches the brain by B6 which is converted to AADC. AADC converts the levodopa to dopamine, which mostly cannot make it through the blood brain barrier. Conversely B6 is removed from the system by the drug carbidopa. So in a mechanical representation, Since this is done in circulation and there’s no single organ that does it, this is like a throttle, like the accelerator pedal on your car. You step on the throttle and B6 dispatches to the muscles, and out of circulation so it’s no longer converting levodopa to dopamine, And the levodopa makes it into your brain. Synthetically, if you take the drug carbidopa it destroys the B6 temporarily until you eat again, but during that window there is no B6 and the levodopa makes it to the brain. However note that in this case the B6 doesn’t go to your muscles to do it’s job there. It’s just gone in this case.
Let off the accelerator and some of the B6 returns to circulation trimming back the levodopa that makes it to your brain.
So my thinking is that if we can improve the performance of the mesenteric organs and determine strategies to minimize circulating B6, we may be able to reduce or eliminate the need for medication.
Here’s my first attempt, comments appreciated:
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