You may consider that you have a dust mite allergy. If you have any of: chronic coughing, frequent sickness, eczema, or IBS then that is even more evidence this is your problem.
No one will probably believe this, but I think dust mite exposure is a major cause of vitamin D deficiency and a lot of the negative outcomes associated with low vitamin D are actually second+ order effects of dust mite exposure. Just posting in case it reaches one person out of the 100s of millions who are sick from dust mites.
citation? There's many open to believing it and the reach maybe more if there are studies that confirm causation with a high probability.
fwiw - vit-d supplementation is one of the easiest supplements available. The recommended dosage 400IU is way lower than what can actually bring your levels up. You need about 4000IU of supplementation and regular testing if you're not exposed to sunlight and/or your dairy intake is poor.
I've read hundreds of dust mite studies, and this is the conclusion I came to, but it's difficult to put in a direct single argument with a citation that most people would require to accept it. I also got dust mites entirely out of my home and my chronically low vitamin D was resolved without a change in lifestyle or supplementation.
But I'll do my best to share some of the steps toward this conclusion:
#1. There is a body of molecular research showing dust mite allergens directly damage the immune system, most importantly once you inhale their fecal pods, they cause epithelial permeability in the lungs. (this study is a good overview of several ways it directly damages the immune system, all of which are totally unrelated to type 1 hypersensitivity, btw: https://www.jacionline.org/article/S0091-6749(18)30848-0/ful...)
#2. There are challenge studies that show dust mites directly causing eczema symptoms after inhalation, which shows that dust mite allergens can act on areas other than the respiratory system, probably by entering the blood stream. Of course there are also challenge studies for asthma. (here's a paper arguing for causal role in asthma https://www.atsjournals.org/doi/full/10.1164/rccm.200811-175...)
#3. All of the major allergic diseases(asthma, eczema, rhinitis, and although it is not as well studies, I believe IBS) have epithelial damage and increased allergy as a core feature of the disease. #1 and #2 are good evidence that dust mites play a causal role in these diseases
#4. From asthma and epithelial permeability in the lungs you can get to worse outcomes from flu and covid etc, from rhinitis you can get to worse sleep and worse mental health etc and reach a large number of health outcomes.
#5. It's true that people with allergy suffer worse from all these problems, but so much damage has already been done before you even get to Type 1 hypersensitivity, but that's another story.
So basically, dust mites directly damage your immune system in the lungs, skin, nose, eyes, guts(and maybe more?), create a sustained immune response, and leads to a multitude of other bad health outcomes.
People have a mental model that vitamins are at the root level of causality, and therefore don't consider that vitamin D could also be caused by dust mite exposure.
And of course high IgE is directly caused by exposure to dust mites if you're sensitized.
I don't know the specific mechanism by which they cause low vitamin d, but two possibilities are that #1: the high and sustained immune response your body runs from constant dust mite exposure consumes vitamin D and acts like a leaky bucket. #2: dust mites somehow disrupt vitamin d production in the skin(e.g. there was one study showing https://www.jacionline.org/article/S0091-6749(13)01768-5/ful...)
Basically a two step process:
1. Keep humidity at 40% year round, using dehumidifiers. This stops their biology and makes them go dormant quickly. Their eggs and protonymphs will die out after a year or so.
2. Remove existing allergens from your home. In short: allergen covers around your bed, get rid of old fabric stuff(curtains, rugs, carpet). Launder everything you can on the highest heat possible.
Basically a two step process:
1. Keep humidity at 40% year round, using dehumidifiers. This stops their biology and makes them go dormant quickly. Their eggs and protonymphs will die out after a year or so.
2. Remove existing allergens from your home. In short: allergen covers around your bed, get rid of old fabric stuff(curtains, rugs, carpet). Launder everything you can on the highest heat possible.
I made a free copy/paste helper meant to help get multiple source code files into LLMs. Just something simple to give more granular control over context and work with other ides eg xcode
nice! I recently got dust mites out of my home completely, and it was a miraculous upgrade to my health, including several symptoms that are outside the definitions of allergic asthma/eczema/rhinitis.
One important thing people are missing about dust mite allergy is the many ways in which they directly damage your immune system and body, outside of the usual frame of "allergies" which is based on type 2 hypersensitivity.
I’m really glad to see this side discussion on dust mite allergy happening here. I’ve had dust mite allergy since childhood, and I even had adenoid removal surgery at age ~7 to address it. Nothing seems to help.
I think dust mite allergy imitates some of the symptoms of sleep apnea, because your nasal passage gets blocked at night, waking you in a similar way to choking.
I’ve reached my mid-30s, largely ignoring the symptoms, but over the past few months I’ve been experiencing a truly terrible bout of insomnia.
I think it’s time to take the allergy seriously again. I’ll follow your guide and make some changes. If I could suggest an improvement to your guide: it may be useful to have a section (perhaps chapter 5?) on symptom relief. I’ve had friends say that a neti pot works wonders, for example.
There's an interesting "subcategory" of sleep apnea under the moniker of UARS. I'm pretty confident that a big chunk of folks in that community actually have allergenic rhinitis (or structural issues).
I actually had a home sleep study done before I figured out it was allergies. Came back negative for OSA but my RIP [1] band data showed a lot of paradoxical breathing and flow limitation indicating significant respiratory effort. So more or less struggling to breathe all night long.
The poor sleep quality really destroys your quality of life.
Appreciate the resource -- I think my biggest question from reading it: How can you actually tell if you have dust mite problems? How can you tell if they've gotten better or not? How can I tell if I've hit a point where things are about as good as they're going to get? etc.
I have asthma symptoms from dust mites, and discovered that sniffing items creates a reaction in my lungs that is pretty sensitive to the amount of allergen in the item. Dust mite allergens also have a distinct but subtle smell you can learn.
Regarding whether or not your health issues are caused by dust mites, if you have any of the allergic disease, or if you have a tested dust mite allergy, it is likely they are causing problems. Disease severity is also associated with dust mite exposure.
Basically, the worse you have allergies, the more likely it's dust mites.
It's an almost certainty you home has dust mites and their allergens, unless you live in a very dry climate.
My advice is to create conditions in your house in which dust mites cannot thrive, which is relatively easy to verify with hygrometers. Over time, this will lead to lead to lower allergen levels, particularly if you are proactive about removing the ones that are currently there.
Another simple hack is to exit your outside the home outer clothes when you get home. There are virulent extra allergic dust mites, that has really helped my family. And these products can help with laundry at lower temps and harder to launder items. https://elfbrands.com/collections/elf-brands
I tried to send a message to your the feedback email address on your dustmite guide site but gmail told me it was undeliverable because the address was not found.
What I emailed about was asking what you meant by biweekly for washing bedding - is that twice a week or every other week?
In the early days, populations of eggs and protonymphs are high and perhaps you haven't learned to control humidity in different weather conditions, washing 2x a week will be effective imho.
But if you can maintain low humidity for a longer periods, the dust mite populations in your home will go down and frequent washing will be less important.
thanks for letting me know my email fwding is not working. Twice a week. Be sure to wash as hot as your machine can do. I found that the highest setting on my front loading LG washer does 158f and is more effective than the next hottest setting.
I have to write this here it might help someone: I had the worst case of mite allergy since childhood - no smells let alone no breathing from my nose. 5 years ago I started immunotherapy - my good dr basically injected me with the allergen every week for 1-2 years. After that, I got a monthly injection with the max dosage for like a year. I haven't had this allergy ever since. I can smell again and breathe from my nose. My dr has healed this awful disease.
Modern medicine sometimes works like magic. If you have this disease know that you don't have to suffer this bs. Try to fix it with the help of your dr.
I'm curious whether anyone has written much about this subject as it's very interesting and rarely discussed.
I've done this a few times and overall it went better than working with a stranger-founder.
ALTHOUGH - You should understand that, independent from the various forms of risk the business faces, and also independent from the financial risk and uncertainty you face through your agreements with the startup:
1. The social fabric of startups are highly unstable for the first few years.
2. The beliefs the participants have about the world, the other people in the organization, what to do, and so on is also highly unstable.
Your relationship is a minor player relative to the other(sometimes chaotic) forces affecting the organization, however generally it works in your favor.
Also, the normal rules for navigating a startup are still apply. Of those, the most important is selecting the right startup to join.
Thank you for making this! I’ve been dissatisfied with the options available for making local GUIs and curious about what could be done with game engines. What was it like working with the UI layer of Godot?
Quite fun. I find it a lot simpler and more intuitive than other UI frameworks I've worked with (especially front-end webdev), but I understand it's very opinionated. Once you get accustomed to using Control nodes in Godot (that's what they call UI components), it becomes super easy to rapidly prototype and design anything you'd like.
