Cells are swapping their mitochondria. What does this mean for our health?

Fascinating. I wonder if there will soon be a way to culture your mitochondria externally in order to give you extra, maybe it could help with diseases like chronic fatigue.

Mitochondria doping! People are already thinking how to use it for sports performance. https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2025/02/14/new-doping-trick...

Beyond athletic performance and chronic fatigue, some neurologists and psychiatrists have recently suggested that every mental disorder (literally, the entire DSM) has a single underlying cause: mitochondrial dysfunction. If that's true, mitochondria transplants could solve the mental health crisis.

Re mental health - this is extremely interesting if it turns out to be correct. Thanks for sharing

It seems like yet another misunderstanding of a series of complex problems by promising a simple one-stop solution. Maybe it'll work for some things, but it's also making claims that something like PTSD can be sorted out via a mitochondria flush, which doesn't make any sense to me.

You'd be aiding in one-half of the issue though (environment/internal).

Maybe that would help, but the claim is that mitochondrial dysfunction is the source of every "literally, the entire DSM" mental disorder, and that is an unbelievable claim, especially when the DSM runs the gamut from PTSD to Erectile Dysfunction to Caffeine Withdrawal. It says to me that it's a poorly considered claim.

You sound very certain of yourself. Yet you cite no evidence at all except your gut feeling. Let's review these so-called "poorly considered claims":

(2014) https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/24845118/

"Evidence suggests that alterations in mitochondrial morphology, brain energy metabolism, and mitochondrial enzyme activity may be involved in the pathophysiology of different neuropsychiatric disorders"

(2021) https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC8291901/

"we provide a focused narrative review of the currently available evidence supporting the involvement of mitochondrial dysfunction in mood disorders"

(2022) https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/36181925/

"Increasing experimental evidence supports a role for mitochondrial dysfunctions in neuropsychiatric disorders. "

(2024) https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S01497...

"We summarize the existing literature on mitochondrial dynamics perturbations in psychiatric disorders/neuropsychiatric phenotypes"

While psychology today ain't a scientific journal, they provide an excellent summary, providing that evidence is both widespread and well known. https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/the-therapy-center/2...

Dr. Chris Palmer's book "Brain Energy" is a good introduction to the body of research. Dozens of pages of citations, you can judge for yourself how well-considered they are. - "Mitochondrial dysfunction has been found in a wide range of diagnoses that include pretty much every symptom found in psychiatry".

"Pretty much every symptom" is not going hard enough. There has yet to be a single psychiatric symptom that isn't theoretically and empirically linked to metabolic dysfunction. The only symptoms he left out were the ones which have no published research!

And finally, just this week Forbes had a feature about it. Again, not a sci journal but there's enough interest to name it the "quiet revolution underway in psychiatry". https://www.forbes.com/sites/jessepines/2025/04/05/could-mit...

---

Do you still feel that the metabolic theory of mental illness is an unbelievable claim, poorly considered?

It may not be THE only answer. But at the very least, this theory is well supported with decades of research and deserves serious consideration.