Kicking six years of chronic fatigue and how I accidently became a biohacker.

Kicking six years of chronic fatigue and how I accidently became a biohacker.

After 5 years of low but stable platelets, I realised that I needed to address my chronic fatigue. Both my GP and haematologist have both constantly told me that there is no clinical reason they know of why I should be experiencing chronic fatigue. In the past, I have pointed out to both medics that the majority of Antiphospholipid Syndrome (APS) and Immune Thrombocytopenia (ITP) patients identify as living with chronic fatigue when surveyed by their respective patient support associations. In autumn 2025, I decided that I would explore the vast array of supplements and try some which could possibly help and yet crucially wouldn't worsen my autoimmune conditions or put me at any greater risk of bleeding or thrombosis.

Although I normally sleep between 8 or 9 hours each night, I still wake up feeling exhausted and this fatigue continues through many days. Sleep trackers tell me that I am getting insufficient continuous deep sleep 6 nights out of 7. I decided to start with magnesium supplementation. In November, I started taking 800mg of Burgerstein Magnesium Orotate (OTC) between 16:00 - 17:00. This put roughly 50mg of magnesium deep into my cells. Then at bedtime, I take an additional 300mg of magnesium as a knock out dose. This is Burgerstein's MagnesiumVital product which is a mix of Magnesium Bisglycinate and Magnesium Citrate.  A few weeks of this magnesium regime, I noticed that I was waking up feeling a little better than in the past and my sleep scores had risen slightly too.

Buoyed by the fact that I had made some progress with my sleep, what if I could do the same with reducing my systemic inflammation and oxidative stress caused by my autoimmune conditions? Good sleep is one of the most important factors in reducing inflammation. My hypothesis was that by reducing inflammation, I would further reduce chronic fatigue and improve my sense of wellbeing and energy during the daytime. For the last few years, I have been taking the following supplements with breakfast: 2g of DHA Omega 3, 5000 IU of Vitamin D3, 120 mcg K2, a multivitamin and an iron tablet. What more could I safely add to this regime which might help?

When I plugged my conditions/medications and supplement list into Gemini AI, it recommended Ubiquinol (the reduced form of CoQ10). "Supplementation would help reduce my prothrombotic and inflammatory status." Wow, that was a big claim to make! I delved deeper and the source was a randomized placebo-controlled trial from 2017 run by Carlos Pérez-Sánchez in University of Córdoba (Spain). My immediate question was why had I not heard of this trial before? I have been reading lots about my conditions and following patient support groups closely for years, yet this trial went unnoticed.

The more I looked into ubiquinol, the more it made sense for me to add it to my supplement list. In 2023, my GP advised that I take a 20mg statin. Given a family history of heart disease and my APS, this seemed like a no brainer. Switching back to Ubiquinol, it is highly recommended for your mitochondrial function, specifically one of the four processes in ATP production. The more I dug into the literature, the more I realised that my statin had a side effect of lowering CoQ10 levels, making the Electron Transport Chain (ETC) less efficient. It is widely thought that myalgia and fatigue that can be experienced while taking statins, is caused by the statin induced lowering of CoQ10 levels.  More surprisingly, I hadn't appreciated how mitochondrial function drops off with age, regardless of statin use, and that perhaps most of us of 45 years old should be taking Ubiquinol.

I began supplementing with 200mg of ubiquinol at breakfast. Ubiquinol isn't cheap compared to ubiquinone, but the effectiveness of ubiquinol makes it worth the money. At middle age we no longer have the metabolic efficiency to convert ubiquinone to the reduced form of ubiquinol. Ubiquinol is the reduced active form which is used for energy production in your mitochondria. In taking ubiquinol directly, we are bypassing this now inefficient process in our aging bodies.

Supplementing directly with ubiquinol also has the advantage of superior absorption by the gut, meaning you can supplement with a smaller dose than ubiquinone. 

Ubiquinol is the form of CoQ10 that acts as a powerful antioxidant. It is the only fat-soluble antioxidant actually synthesized by the body. I am triple positive with antiphospholipid antibodies (aPLs), which can result in dangerous levels of oxidative stress and cell damage. This can result in a vicious cycle of more oxidative stress produces more antibodies, which in turn produces more oxidative stress. 

As we all age, even without the presence of aPLs, our oxidative stress naturally increases. Keeping our oxidative stress in check through ubiquinol supplementation is something that we could all potentially benefit from. 

Looking into mitochondrial health lead me down another rabbit hole. The second supplement which is always mentioned along with ubiquinol is pyrroloquinoline quinone (PQQ). Where as ubiquinol helps to ensure that ATP is produced efficiently through ETC by moving electrons between different "complexes", PQQ actually increases the mitochondrial cell count. For someone in my situation, PQQ has several advantages. With my aPLs potentially damaging my existing mitochondrial cells, PQQ bypasses this damage by building fresh, healthy mitochondria. This ensures I have enough mitochondrial cells to handle the energy demands of my cells. Secondly, PQQ itself is an incredibly resilient and powerful antioxidant which is able to go through thousands of antioxidant cycles, mopping up free radicals and reducing oxidative stress, without breaking down. Perhaps the biggest benefit of PQQ for me though is in protecting the endothelial cells (the lining of your blood vessels) to prevent clots. Protecting endothelial cell function is the primary reason I take such a large amount of omega 3 and vitamin D3.

I decided to take my first PQQ supplement on a Thursday 15 January. Following the mantra of "start low and go slow", I took 10mg with breakfast rather than the 'normal' 20mg.  Mid morning, I drove over to my friend's house for a decaf coffee and looked through his windows at the sunshine in his garden. Over the space of five minutes a fog lifted, a clean energy pulsed through my brain and I had the mental focus of someone a few decades younger. Wow. After lunch, for more than two hours I helped my daughter revise and the conversation drifted from economics into politics, humanism and life. PQQ had lifted the fog. I spent a little time that evening double checking that this buzz, clarity and focus wasn't doing me any harm. I was reassured to discover that is wasn't! I then took my magnesium supplements and had the best night's sleep in years.

After doing more research into PQQ and double checking whether it really was safe for me to take, I came across another benefit of PQQ for me. The resilience of PQQ as a stable antioxidant means that it takes the pressure off glutathione in mopping up the reactive oxygen species (ROS) from the oxidative stress. This lead me down another rabbit hole to work out what glutathione was and how it was relevant in my situation. What I found shocked me. Apparently  most people with aPLs typically have low glutathione levels as the glutathione in their system is dealing with excessive oxidative stress. Was this also happening in my case (it's all about me!)? I went back over my numerous blood test for GGT, the blood marker for glutathione, and discovered that they were all low, very low. What shocked me was that GGT was measured on my blood test but not flagged as something which was abnormal. It turns out that high GGT (Gamma-Glutamyl Transferase) test is mostly thought of as a "liver test," a marker for further investigation if high. In reality, when reporting very low it is a sentinel for oxidative stress and glutathione status. In Switzerland, there is apparently no flag on how low your GGT level should be.

So I now need to supplement glutathione? Another day, another rabbit hole. It turns out that our bodies make glutathione and many people aid this production through supplementing with NAC (N-Acetyl Cysteine), which is the rate limiting ingredient for the production of glutathione in the body. NAC is also a whole lot cheaper than taking glutathione directly. With my aPLs, oxidative stress and persistent low glutathione levels, my body would probably take a very long time to build up my glutathione levels through supplementing only with NAC. How much and what form of glutathione should I take? While researching this I read that the buzz element I had got from PQQ was probably because my glutathione levels were so low and that I should restart PQQ supplementation when I had raised my glutathione levels. After a week of PQQ I stopped supplementing and started taking 200mg of liposomal glutathione. 

At this point in my research I reread the Carlos Pérez-Sánchez paper from their 2017 trial. One of the reasons they chose ubiquinol in the trial was because ubiquinol has been shown to raise glutathione levels, which are commonly low in patients with aPLs. But why hadn't the trial looked directly at the effects of supplementation with glutathione? Also in 2017, a study from Penn State University College of Medicine reported that liposomal glutathione was well absorbed by the body. Up until this point, it was thought that it wasn't possible to effectively raise glutathione levels through direct supplementation (it was the liposomal element of the glutathione which made the difference on absorption). My guess is that the 2017 trial chose ubiquinol before the Penn State study had become widely known.

Whilst reading, I unearthed a likely link between mitochondrial health and dementia. This jumped out at me as I carry one copy of the APOE ε4 allele, increasing my baseline risk of Alzheimer's two - three fold. In García-Carpintero (2021) paper, 200mg of ubiquinol significantly improved Cerebral Vasoreactivity (CVR). This is the brain's ability to dilate blood vessels when given to for one year to  patients with Mild Cognitive Impairment. APOE ε4carriers often show early deficits in cerebral blood flow. By improving CVR, ubiquinol helps ensure the brain receives consistent oxygen and nutrients for the brain's micro-vessels.

The study also found plasma from ubiquinol-supplemented patients protected endothelial cells from death (necrosis) and inflammation. This is particularly relevant in my case as antiphospholipid antibodies directly attack the endothelial lining, this study provides evidence that ubiquinol creates a protective "shield" for those specific cells, reducing the likelihood of the inflammatory damage that leads to clots.

Thirdly, the researchers noted a significant reduction in chronic inflammation markers where ubiquinol supplementation reduced levels of I have paid and uploaded to SWICA.

In addition, keeping systemic inflammation low is critical, as the ε4 allele is associated with a "pro-inflammatory" brain environment.

With all of this information uncovered, supplementation with ubiquinol, glutathione and PQQ was the best way forward for me.

Conclusions.

This brings me up to date. In 10 days time I have my regular 3 month blood test and I look forward to seeing whether my blood values reflect my new sense of wellbeing and lack of chronic fatigue. I plan to discuss this new supplement regime with my GP along with what GGT blood values represent.

Particular thanks go to my wife for her patience and understanding through years of chronic fatigue. Also thanks to Gemini AI for helping me to join the dots in my research between scientific papers, studies and trials. I may not be out of the woods in terms of autoimmune conditions, but I have found a clearing in the forest where I can live comfortably and happily without chronic fatigue. At the moment this really feels like a game changer.

There isn't really a moral to this slightly rambling discourse. That said, the last few years of living with autoimmune conditions have highlighted that we are all unique and that empowerment over your health and medical conditions is possible. This is especially relevant when living with rare autoimmune conditions where even my haematologist openly admits that I am his first patient he has seen with these particular conditions.

In terms of some kind of disclaimer, I have done the above additional supplementation with extreme caution, fully conscious of the medical tightrope I navigate with my two autoimmune conditions which present a profound clinical conflict in management. I would advise anyone who is thinking of adding additional supplements to their regime to do their homework and speak to the medical professionals.

My current list of daily meds / supplements with a brief description.

Before breakfast...

80mg cardio aspirin (prescribed).

2 * 100mg Biocyte Liposomal Glutathione.

2 * 667 mg VeLife Magnesium L-threonate (96mg magnesium) for brain health to reduce any inflammation from antiphospholipid antibodies and aid risk mitigation from being a APOE ε4 allele carrier (see Guosong Lui et al paper).

With breakfast...

one brazil nut (add approximately 80mcg of selenium for glutathione supplement effectiveness).

one Burgerstein Multivitamin (selenium and zinc, also a catch all for any other trace deficiency).

30ml of Burgerstein Omega 3 liquid (2 dessert spoons), equiv. 2g DHA (endothelial cell health / anti-oxidant properties / aid APOE4 Transport).

5000 IU of  Dr Jacobs Oil Vitamin D3 with 120mcg K2 (MK7).

100mg iron from Ferrum Hausmann (3 times a week). (Prescribed).

14mg zinc from Burgerstein ZincVital (winter months for immune support against viruses / combat winter blues).

200mg Pharma Nord Ubiquinol (NOT Ubiquinone) with vitamin C (reduced thrombosis risk / mitochondrial health / antioxidant protection / endothelial function / reverses atherosclerosis genes / lowers proinflammatory cytokines.

10mg (to be continued after 6 weeks of glutathione supplementation) of PQQ (MGCPQQ) from Bonusan PQQ Energie Komplex. (endothelial cell health / mitochondrial biogenesis as I have aPLs and a an APOE4 carrier / neuroprotection from amyloid-beta proteins / 

800mg Burgerstein Magnesium Orotate (endothelial function / synergy with PQQ & Ubiquinol / magnesium delivery to mitochondria cells).

At bedtime...

300mg Burgersteins MagnesiumVital (Magnesium Bisglycinate and Magnesium Citrate for sleep and magnesium supplementation).

10/20mg Ezetimib-Atorvastatin  (prescribed).

References

Ubiquinol Effects on Antiphospholipid Syndrome Prothrombotic Profile: A Randomized, Placebo-Controlled Trial. 2017. Carlos Pérez-Sánchez et al.

Arteriosclerosis, Thrombosis, and Vascular Biology. Volume 37, Number 10

https://doi.org/10.1161/ATVBAHA.117.309225

Randomized controlled trial of oral glutathione supplementation on body stores of glutathione. 2015. Richie, J. P. et al. Penn State University College of Medicine,

European Journal of Clinical Nutrition, 69(1), 59–66.

https://doi.org/10.1038/ejcn.2014.132

Ubiquinol Supplementation Improves Gender-Dependent Cerebral Vasoreactivity and Ameliorates Chronic Inflammation and Endothelial Dysfunction in Patients with Mild Cognitive Impairment. 2021. García-Carpintero, S. et al.

Antioxidants, 10(2), 143.

https://doi.org/10.3390/antiox10020143

Efficacy and Safety of MMFS-01, a Synapse Density Enhancer, for Treating Cognitive Impairment in Older Adults: A Randomized, Double-Blind, Placebo-Controlled Trial.

Guosong Liu et al.

Journal of Alzheimer’s Disease 49 (2016) 971–990

https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC4927823/