Hello MC360 community!
Kam here, Mast Cell 360 Health Coach, with part 3 of this series on histamine.
In part 1 we covered your castle guards and the four docking stations histamine locks onto (H1, H2, H3, H4). And in and part 2 we looked at how histamine affects digestion and even your heart rate.
In this one we’ll be looking more closely at histamine and the brain. How it affects things like mood, sleep, and more. To be clear, many of histamine’s effects in the body and brain are still being researched and studied. More information is coming out all the time. But we’ll take a closer look at what we do know, what recent research is showing, and how it may play a role in your everyday experience.
In this post, you’ll read about:
The barrier around your brain and how mast cells work here
How histamine functions in your brain
Circadian rhythm and why symptoms often spike overnight
Links between histamine and mood
How mood may be influenced by your brain AND your body
Where to start if sleep, mood, brain fog, and other issues are part of your picture
Let’s get into it.
This post is for informational purposes only. To read our full disclaimer, please scroll to the bottom of this post.
Before we get into this topic, it helps to know about the blood-brain barrier (BBB).
Regular blood vessels elsewhere in your body are a little leaky on purpose, which is how nutrients and immune cells move in and out of tissue.
Brain blood vessels are different. The cells lining them pack together extra tightly, so almost nothing gets through without a specific transport system built for it. You can think of it like a carefully guarded wall with checkpoints.
Some mast cells, your guards, are stationed all along this wall, on the brain side. They’re on standby to detect and respond to threats that make it past the barrier. But when they degranulate, they release compounds that loosen the barrier itself, increasing permeability right where they’re stationed.
And studies show over and over again that increased mast cell degranulation creates a leakier blood-brain-barrier.
Even researchers don’t know how everything works yet, so whether that plays a large role in what we’ll discuss isn’t yet known. But the basics of what we do know are helpful.
Here’s something a lot of people don’t know... your brain makes its own histamine, and the histamine system in your brain is largely separate from the histamine system elsewhere in your body.
Your brain makes its own histamine from two different sources, and they do different jobs.
Source one: mast cells sitting near the meninges (the brain’s protective covering) and along the blood-brain barrier itself. Their histamine release is mostly about local immune defense and guarding that BBB.
Source two: a cluster of histamine-producing neurons. Neurons are tiny cells wired for getting electrical messages through your body. For our purposes here, we are looking at a specific cluster in the tuberomammillary nucleus (TMN), tucked in the back of your hypothalamus.
The hypothalamus is a small but powerful part of your brain that keeps your body in balance (homeostasis). Like an operations manager, it regulates temperature, hunger, thirst, sleep, and stress through the HPA axis.
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