Hidden Mitochondria Problems Are Accelerating Your Age & Draining Your Health

What if the key to reversing chronic disease, slowing cognitive decline, and boosting energy lies in the tiny powerhouses inside your cells—and we’ve finally found a way to protect them?

We know mitochondria power our cells, but did you know they also create oxidative stress as they generate energy? Protecting mitochondrial health is critical—but most antioxidants can’t reach inside the mitochondria where protection is needed most—until now. MitoQ, a scientifically advanced, mitochondria-targeted antioxidant developed by visionary researchers in New Zealand penetrates mitochondria up to 90%, offering protection where it’s needed most.

In this episode with Dr. Siobhan Mitchell, we dive into how MitoQ is transforming the way we tackle chronic disease, inflammation, and cognitive decline. From improving heart health to supporting brain function, MitoQ is changing the game. It’s something I’m using personally and recommending to most of my patients. Listen in to discover how this powerful tool can help you support your patients at the cellular level—before symptoms even appear. ~DrKF

In this episode of New Frontiers in Functional Medicine, Dr. Siobhan Mitchell, Chief Scientific Officer at MitoQ, explores how mitochondrial health is key to tackling chronic disease, inflammation, cognitive decline, and cardiovascular issues. Dr. Mitchell explains how optimizing mitochondrial function can empower practitioners to go beyond symptom management and target the root causes of disease. They discuss groundbreaking insights on how mitochondrial dysfunction contributes to poor health outcomes—and how MitoQ, a next-generation mitochondrial-targeted antioxidant, delivers 1000x better bioavailability than traditional CoQ10 supplements, supports cellular energy production, reduces oxidative stress, and enhances clinical outcomes for patients with complex, chronic conditions. Plus, learn how mitochondrial testing can help identify early dysfunction, allowing for proactive, personalized care. This episode gives functional medicine practitioners the tools and insights needed to boost patient health by focusing on mitochondria—the powerhouse of health.

In this episode of New Frontiers, learn about:

Dr. Kara Fitzgerald: Hi everybody, welcome to New Frontiers in Functional Medicine where we are interviewing the best minds in functional medicine and of course today is no exception. If you’re on YouTube, you can see that I’m sitting next to the amazing Dr. Siobhan Mitchell. Let me give you her background and we’ll jump right into what will be an interesting conversation for you today. Dr. Mitchell has a PhD in neuroscience from SUNY Albany. She also completed a postdoc fellowship on brain aging at the University of Washington. She has over 15 years of clinical research experience, seven patents on mood and cognitive food products, and has authored over 50 papers on aging, brain health, nutrition, metabolic health, and more. She’s got a personal passion for brain aging research.

Dr. Kara Fitzgerald: Siobhan has also worked on metabolic and skin health, appetite, sports physiology, and cellular health, which she now focuses on as chief scientific officer for the research-backed cellular health company, MitoQ. These guys are the creators of the world’s first mitochondrial targeted antioxidant and that is going to form the basis of our conversation today. Dr. Mitchell it’s awesome to be back here with you.

Siobhan Mitchell, PhD: Yeah, I’m excited too. I’m excited to have a discussion.

Dr. Kara Fitzgerald: Yeah, actually, I say back here with you, because we did an awesome webinar, folks.

Siobhan Mitchell, PhD: We did, we did.

Dr. Kara Fitzgerald: It was just a lot of fun. And clinicians, if you’re not signed up to get our e-newsletter or information on our webinars, please do because they’re really some of the most rocking out there, actually. I didn’t mean to plug it, but we happen to have a great webinar together and I think it’s because what you are up to over there in the world of MitoQ is really pretty remarkable and science – people who tune into this are excited about science. So as you say, you’ve got the world’s first mitochondrial-targeted antioxidant. Why are you focusing on mitochondria, specifically for healthy aging but you can expand from there, and let’s talk about what this molecule is.

Siobhan Mitchell, PhD: Yeah, great. I think your listeners have had a lot of mitochondria science given to them, but I just want to give you my own quick take on it. And just to start off with, everyone knows that mitochondria are the powerhouse of the cell, but they do so much more and I actually think about them as a key signaling place of the cell that’s directing the cell how to respond to stress. They’re kind of like the canary in the coal mine of anything that’s going wrong in terms of cellular stress, like DNA damage or changes in various kinds of fuel. The mitochondria will give that signal, like, my gosh, disaster’s looming, let’s just change the way that we’re working. And because of this ability that they have, they’re able to basically cause cells to go senescent, they’re able to make cells go through apoptosis, and they’re also able to, basically, cause dysfunction in pretty much every cell that we have if they’re not getting the right energy.

Siobhan Mitchell, PhD: And the problem with the fact that they’re creating all the energy is that they’re also creating all of the oxidative stress in the cell. So up to 95% of the oxidative stress is coming from the mitochondria and if you’re not controlling that perfectly all the time, then at some point your mitochondria start to dysfunction and send these distress signals throughout the cell. And just to kind of point out what that stress can mean outside the cell is things like inflammation. For instance, they’re starting to discover that mitochondria are basic mediators of immune responses and so when mitochondria get turned on too long, they can cause this immune reaction that is basically a cytokine storm. I think listeners have heard of that term. Cytokine storm is when you have so many cytokines flooding your system that your body is now just fighting off huge amounts of damage from inflammation pathways.

Dr. Kara Fitzgerald: And we think that this might be sourced to a mitochondrial dysfunction. Wow, that’s pretty extraordinary.

Siobhan Mitchell, PhD: Yeah, this pathway is directed by the mitochondria. So things like mitochondrial DNA leakage into the cell can start this inflammasome, which then can lead to a cytokine storm, which then can lead to basic inflammation everywhere in the body. And you can see that happening through things like IL-6, TNF-alpha. So that’s just one way that mitochondria is really directing how our body is responding and this is another reason why we think that it’s a key place to target for aging.

Dr. Kara Fitzgerald: Yeah, it makes a lot of sense.

Siobhan Mitchell, PhD: Yeah. And for sure, I think, we’re all understanding because the mitochondria is so vulnerable, like this place of oxidative stress, they have so much more damage being incurred. So DNA damage in the mitochondria is happening at 10 times the pace of nuclear DNA damage, for instance. It’s just likely that you’re going to have damage happening to mitochondria first in the cell compared to other places. And so for instance, modern lifestyles, like the fact that we have too much fat and sugar in our diets, exposure to pesticides or other chemicals or nanoplastics, they’re going to affect the mitochondria. It’s a vulnerable area of the cell, and then they’re going to cause that dysfunction, which then can create those cascades I just described.

Dr. Kara Fitzgerald: Right. I would imagine it’s a continuum. So not everybody’s going to obviously be descending into a full tilt cytokine storm, but there’s just low grade underlying inflammation.

Siobhan Mitchell, PhD: Yeah, you can have low-level inflammation too. Yeah, inflammaging. Exactly.

Dr. Kara Fitzgerald: Wow. What is mitochondria being on all the time? What is that? Just attempting to put out energy? What would put a mitochondria into that state?

Siobhan Mitchell, PhD: Into that stress mode. So it’s really, I would say, the fact that the way that mitochondria wants to operate all the time is to have the right amount of fuel, just the right amount. So if there’s too much fuel, for instance, if there’s too much glucose available, this could actually cause mitochondria to dysfunction and that can lead to diabetes, for instance. And, the same thing about other things that are happening in the cell, if you have like too much calcium or if you have like other kinds of things going wrong the cell. So proteostasis, for instance, so the idea that if your cell starts making too much of one protein or a certain set of proteins, this is going to cause damage to the cell, this proteostasis will then tell the mitochondria, let’s just change things. Let’s just recycle the whole cell and start over again. So that’s another thing that mitochondria are also in charge of. So proteostasis, like, you when you start making too much amyloid or you start making too much of these inflammatory factors, like that kind of stuff is also at play.

Dr. Kara Fitzgerald: We’re going to talk about a lot of stuff, but we’re going to get into the extraordinary research happening with MitoQ, with Mitoquinol, but you said something really interesting, as you did when we did our webinar together. You said a lot of really provocative stuff. But diabetes, you basically just said that diabetes, you know, swamping the mitochondria with glucose, is basically a mitochondriopathy. Like would you say fundamentally? Yeah, frame that.

Siobhan Mitchell, PhD: Yeah. So, I mean, obviously, there are lots of things that can cause diabetic pathology, but they’re starting to really pinpoint mitochondria as a very, very early origin of basically the dysfunction we see and how glucose is handled. And it kind of makes sense because obviously this is where glucose is then going to go get used. For instance, we’re going to talk a little bit about MitoQ in a second, but there is a clinical study showing that MitoQ in people who are prediabetic starting to show the very, very hints of diabetes and poor glucose control, they started to have mitochondrial dysfunction go up as they had a whole bunch of lipid added to their system. It’s called a lipid challenge. And at the same time, this mitochondrial dysfunction, which was basically oxidative stress going up as well, they saw that insulin sensitivity started to go down, so glucose was being taken up less into muscle cells. And so this was just happening with one big kind of bolus amount of lipid, just a big heavy high fat meal. So to me, this indicates, yeah, basically mitochondria directing these really early stages of how well we’re using insulin to get that glucose taken up.

Dr. Kara Fitzgerald: Interesting. That’s really interesting. All right. So before we talk a lot about Mitoquinol, exactly what it is and all of the science around it, how do we evaluate mitochondrial health? And before you respond to that, and we’ll talk about lab testing too, I was educated to think about mitochondropathies, I think, when I was in school, as often being genetic. And then during my postdoc, that changed. There was a book that came out back then for professionals called Acquired Mitochondriopathy, and of course we were seeing that. I was in a laboratory at the time and we were measuring Krebs cycle intermediates like pyruvate and lactate and kind of dancing around Krebs cycle function. And it just seemed to me that, you know, it was a huge wake up to see that there are many things that really burden mitochondria. But even then, I think I was still looking through the lens of acquired mitochondriopathy sort of being limited to sort of a select group.

Dr. Kara Fitzgerald: But now, to your point– to the point around diabetes– now I think that my thinking has shifted really pretty profoundly in appreciating that this underlying mitochondrial imbalance is just everywhere. It’s part of the aging journey and, you know, for many of us it’s much much earlier. So speak to that, but then let’s also talk about how we evaluate mitochondrial health, mitochondrial fitness using labs.

Siobhan Mitchell, PhD: Yeah, exactly. Everything you said, I think is so true. And the fact that people just thought of mitochondrial disorders as primary mitochondrial disorders that you would maybe pick up with a genetic test because someone is showing really acute symptoms, like they have trouble walking, things like that. Now we’re understanding there’s these things called secondary mitochondrial disorders, which is, maybe you don’t have genetic dysfunction or your mitochondria showing a lot of genetic mutations, but they’re just not working as well. And how do you pick that up? And I think that part is really interesting because just for decades and decades, there’s no way to measure your mitochondria that well, right? So you talked about Krebs cycle intermediates, they can be changed by a lot of different things in the body. So that’s really tough.

Siobhan Mitchell, PhD: But what is exciting in the last few years is that now there are commercial tests that can allow us to measure mitochondrial function directly. Measure things like ATP production, oxidative phosphorylation, how much oxidative stress the mitochondria in particular, not just the rest of the body, are making. And then also what kinds of fuel the mitochondria are using, preferentially glucose, fatty acids. I think all these things are really exciting coming out and what’s nice about this is that we can start to identify much earlier for people who are you know, thinking, okay, I’m fatigued. I have a bit of brain fog. What’s going on here? I’ve tried a whole bunch of things. Now they can open up to, hey, maybe I will try a mitochondria test to see if that’s where the problem is happening.

Siobhan Mitchell, PhD: Because as you know really well, a lot of mitochondrial dysfunction can actually translate, you know, the most common symptoms are just fatigue, muscle dystrophy, brain fog, things like that. So. I’ll just quickly name a couple of the commercial tests so that people can be aware of them. One is Mescreen, and it’s basically a blood card that you can spot your blood on. You order it, you spot your blood, and then you send it off, and then you get a full report of all those things I just described: ATP production, oxidative phosphorylation, even which complexes are active in your mitochondria. And there’s another test that’s very similar called MitoSwab and this one is different only in the fact that you take a cheek swab, you kind of take this swab and put it on your cheek, and then you send that in and get this same kind of mitochondrial function.

Siobhan Mitchell, PhD: I think these are going to be the next level for a lot of people, and including physicians, to really understand maybe this is something I should target and understand in conjunction with other traditional tests like inflammation, which we know mitochondria can affect, lactate, all the rest of the sort of more secondary ways of seeing what mitochondria are doing.

Dr. Kara Fitzgerald: I’m thrilled for this. To your point, it’s technology that we’ve needed. We’ve been dancing around assessing mitochondrial function and only the most egregious imbalances will sort of show something meaningful. But I think, really, for many, many years, we just haven’t had the technology, so I’m very excited about this. Do you have a specimen preference, blood versus saliva, or do you think they’re both equally useful?

Siobhan Mitchell, PhD: I think that there’s obviously better uses of having blood getting measured, but I will also just give a little bit of a caveat of you can look at your blood and get a sense of your mitochondria, especially your white blood cell mitochondria, but it doesn’t discount that for instance, maybe your muscle mitochondria are having issues. So in the end, I would love it when we get to the point where we can test mitochondria for different organs and things like that. Not quite near that, but I think, having plasma, at least blood, is the main way you’re checking. This is because there’s a lot of data coming from blood mitochondria function that correlate to many different diseases, which I’m sure you’re aware of, things like long COVID, et cetera.

Dr. Kara Fitzgerald: Yeah, and I think both of these laboratories are working in the research setting as well.

Siobhan Mitchell, PhD: Yes. And full disclosure, I will say that we are doing a study with Mescreen. So, yeah.

Dr. Kara Fitzgerald: And that’s the blood-based technology.

Siobhan Mitchell, PhD: Yes.

Dr. Kara Fitzgerald: Very exciting. I will be incorporating these into my practice. I’ve got one more question on the labs and then I’ll move on. So not just symptomatic… I mean for me, the way that I’ll be using it is certainly for symptoms but also as a screen, you know, just a standard preventative screen. It seems like it’s probably a worthy tool. Would you agree?

Siobhan Mitchell, PhD: Oh yeah, and this, I think, is one of those situations that I can wax poetic about where we don’t understand fully yet how quickly our mitochondria are starting to show age. I would say they’re the first place that is showing age and we kind of know this from even things like VO2 max. You know, your exercise performance in your 20s starts to decrease and it will never be the same capacity ever again and that’s because of your mitochondria. There’s a lot of cognitive function that you will be the best at ever at age 22, and then it will start to decrease and you’ll never get better. And that’s also because of mitochondrial capacity in the brain just can’t get back to that same optimal state. So I would love it if people can start to see where their mitochondrial dysfunction is starting and address it early on.

Dr. Kara Fitzgerald: Get in there.

Siobhan Mitchell, PhD: Yeah, exactly.

Dr. Kara Fitzgerald: Interesting. So really having a baseline early on.

Siobhan Mitchell, PhD: Yeah. Yeah, and and being aware of it because I think people have just ignored it. It’s not like a cholesterol test. It’s not like even an ADD test. It’s so hard for people to realize that that is something to address.

Dr. Kara Fitzgerald: Yeah. Such a fundamental player. Yeah, yeah, we look at lipids. We’ll look at blood sugar. Unfortunately, we’re looking at those earlier and earlier because we’re seeing younger and younger– We’re seeing kids with hyperlipidemia and prediabetes or even diabetes. So we know mitochondriopathy is starting very early if we’re seeing it earlier and earlier. Any benefit to NAD/NADH testing?

Siobhan Mitchell, PhD: For sure. I think this is another great way to see how well your mitochondria are functioning, your kind of redox state, if you will. It’s just that, yeah, once again, it’s not going to be the answer for everything. You will not know exactly what’s going on in your mitochondria because there’s so much else at play. But for sure, it makes sense to look at that and then also fix it if you can.

Dr. Kara Fitzgerald: OK. Let’s talk about Mitoquinol. Let’s talk about what this molecule is. So this is a pivotal piece of the solution. We’re going to be focusing on this and how it came to be and some of the remarkable science that’s happening all over the world in different university settings. What is it? And why don’t we know about it? Why aren’t we? Yeah.

Siobhan Mitchell, PhD: Thanks. What is it? Yes. Why is it not a household name? And this is, I think, a big mystery.

Dr. Kara Fitzgerald: Well, at least in functional medical, why aren’t all of us, as clinicians, just embracing the breath and depth of science around this molecule? Yeah.

Siobhan Mitchell, PhD: Yeah, fully versed in all the science and there’s a lot of it. I think I’ve told you before there are 25 clinical studies published on MitoQ ranging from immune health, to cardiovascular health, to exercise. There’s just a ton of preclinical studies as well, like over 900, showing possible benefits for just a range of diseases. There’s also 20 studies that are currently just in press. So there are also a range of things, like neurological disease, that I will talk about later, but there’s so much interest from the scientific world that it’s fascinating that there’s not as much understanding in the consumer world. But just to back up again and explain what MitoQ is, MitoQ is basically a mitochondrial-targeted antioxidant, as you said at the very beginning of this session, but it is very different than, I think, anything else that people think of as an antioxidant. And I will give you an origin story of how it came to be to explain why it’s different.

Siobhan Mitchell, PhD: I think everyone is aware that mitochondria need to have their own antioxidant defense systems from all the oxidative stress that’s occurring. We just talked about that. But as you age, these antioxidant defense systems go down and especially CoQ10. So CoQ10 levels go down as you age. They also go down as you have various kinds of chronic diseases like diabetes, like cardiovascular disease, things like statins also decrease CoQ10. And it’s really difficult to get CoQ10 when you take it orally to go into your mitochondria because there’s no specific transport system to get that CoQ10 in your mitochondria. There’s just nothing that allows it to go in easily because it’s supposed to be already there, right? That’s supposed to be where it’s been all along. And so these scientists, Mike Murphy and Robin Smith at University of Otago, that’s a city in New Zealand, basically thought, what if we could make an antioxidant that goes directly into the mitochondria and addresses these problems of aging? And so they basically took kind of a version of CoQ10, like a very sort of shortened version and attached what’s called a triphenylphosphonium tag onto it.

Siobhan Mitchell, PhD: And when I say triphenylphosphonium tag, it’s kind of a little lengthy. We usually call it TPP. What this tag is, it’s basically a very positive cation that allows it to get accepted into the very negative mitochondria. The mitochondria is the most negative place in the cell and even cells themselves are somewhat negatively charged, so with this tag, this allows this antioxidant to get into cells very easily and get into the mitochondria very easily, like up to a thousand times more easily than say a CoQ10. And we have lot of studies showing that, for instance, MitoQ can get into mitochondria up to 90%. And this is, I think, far better than any other antioxidant I have ever really heard of to have that way of just getting directly into the place it’s needed most.

Siobhan Mitchell, PhD: So basically, once it’s in the mitochondria, it’s just acting as a very good antioxidant. It’s helping address the good peroxidation, which is another thing that basically causes mitochondria dysfunction. If you don’t have perfect lipids in mitochondria, you won’t have your electron transport chain or your oxidative phosphorylation working well, so this is where MitoQ is protecting the mitochondria against many different insults. And I would say it’s the most effective at doing that because it can get into the mitochondria unlike almost anything else.

Dr. Kara Fitzgerald: That’s pretty amazing. So these guys, these clever New Zealanders, identified this. We were talking about New Zealand. New Zealand engages in some pretty interesting science. So these guys saw the problem was that mitochondria weren’t actually able to use antioxidants particularly efficiently. I think we, in the clinical world, reached for higher and higher doses of— I mean, I don’t think, I know, being a clinician— higher and higher doses of CoQ10, just sort of forcing it. And it’s prohibitive when you’re using sort of gram amounts like 3,000 to 4,000 milligrams of CoQ10. And maybe we would see different— I think the promise of it was extraordinary. The possibility of fixing the electron transport chain, supporting ATP synthesis, sort of the promise of that, being able to supply that player in the electron transport chain. And we can look at serum levels and see it rise exponentially, but I think the promise, if we really think about it, hasn’t panned out clinically.

Dr. Kara Fitzgerald: You know, if we ask ourselves, those of us who use CoQ10, which are most of us, we haven’t seen the clinical change. But you’re actually articulating this mechanistic change that then leads to the clinical outcome that we were all anticipating seeing with CoQ10. So I want you to talk to that, but I also want you to answer the question. I think one of the reasons why we haven’t fully embraced Mitoquinol or MitoQ is that there’s a misnomer that it’s CoQ10, but clearly it’s similar, but these guys restructured it so it can be utilized by the mitochondria. Yeah, go.

Siobhan Mitchell, PhD: Yeah, what you’re saying is totally right. I think this is where CoQ10 has not always panned out as well as people expect. People use it for controlling statin muscle pain and fatigue. Sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn’t, and that kind of makes sense when you look at how much CoQ10 can get to the mitochondria from an oral dose, and it’s less than 10%. Right? So it’s not getting into the place where you need it to help address the muscle dysfunction. And the thing that I will also caution about is that you’re right, MitoQ can probably address a lot of the things that CoQ10 can do in a much better way. And we have many, many examples of this that I will discuss, but it’s not something that is just like another CoQ10, but maybe like a more bioavailable form. It’s a completely different molecule.

Siobhan Mitchell, PhD: For instance, if you took a dose of MitoQ, you can’t use a CoQ10 test to see how much is in your blood. It’s not going to work that way. It’s a different molecule and it’s doing different things. It’s doing, I would say, much of the same things as CoQ10, but it’s doing it in a much more powerful way because of this tag. And I also just want to point out that we do have lot of doctors telling us, yeah, my patients who are on statins, they weren’t really having that much luck with CoQ10. I gave them some MitoQ and then things suddenly turned around. So we have lot of examples of that. We have a comparison study where we looked at CoQ10, we actually use Qunal compared to MitoQ and we saw that MitoQ is actually much better addressing oxidative stress within the muscle. So that’s kind of what you’d expect, right? But CoQ10 wasn’t actually doing much at all in the muscle.

Siobhan Mitchell, PhD: There was also knock-on benefits of that as well where MitoQ could help increase those antioxidant defenses I told you about while CoQ10, given to men for the same amount of time, wasn’t doing much. We do have data just showing us that it’s a different beast, but I think it’s just one of those things where we haven’t done that kind of, oh all right, we’re going to do the statin study and compare directly to this. We just have a lot of, I would say, anecdotes and understanding from physicians we work with that is a better molecule.

Dr. Kara Fitzgerald: I would not argue with seeing a study with that. I don’t know who’s going to invest in doing it. I can see that just looking at the breadth and depth of the research and will link to your the institute. Just tell me the name of that institute where people can go and explore the research and actually apply for product.

Siobhan Mitchell, PhD: Yeah, that’s very important. Exactly. We like to support mitochondrial health research so we have this institute that is part of MitoQ, it’s like an arm of MitoQ, called MCRP. That’s the Mitochondrial Collaborative Research Program. MCRP.dev is our website and if you go there, you can find out how to do a study on, as you said, Kara, CoQ10 versus MitoQ statin study, or just MitoQ on statins by itself, we can help you do that. We can provide you a free product if you want to do a cell culture study or a preclinical study, because you feel like mitochondria might be the answer to whatever disease you’re interested in, we can also help support you. So we would love to work with any researchers that are interested in mitochondria. Come check us out.

Dr. Kara Fitzgerald: That’s awesome. It is a fun place to kind of play around in because you can see all the preclinical and clinical research that’s happening right now. So yeah, in the CoQ10 space I saw a lot of supplement companies attempt to answer the inadequate outcome by creating lipophilic products, or we would suggest people take it with a fatty meal, et cetera, et cetera. There’s been a lot of work at trying to make it do something that it just isn’t doing and I can understand why there wouldn’t be so much head to head work, like let’s compare CoQ10 and MitoQ in this condition or this condition, because I think a lot of the scientists have moved beyond there really being anything worth exploring there and so are simply using Mitoquinol in these various conditions. Would you say that’s true?

Siobhan Mitchell, PhD: Yeah, and I think this is where, as you said, it’s just that CoQ10 might be a great antioxidant for maybe the rest of the cell. It’s just not going to address mitochondrial oxidative stress, so then it’s not the answer. I would say that’s where MitoQ can be a much better answer and that’s why when I just told you about this institute, we have people coming to us all the time. This week we have someone who wants to do a post-stroke rehabilitation study with us, for instance. We never pay for any of these actual clinical studies. People just want to test this themselves because as I said, the research community, the scientific community, believe so strongly in MitoQ that they want to see how this works for all sorts of different diseases from cognitive frailty, to schizophrenia, to IBS, to diabetes, as I just pointed out. We have so many studies and you can also just check out all those studies that we’re involved in that are going on currently on that website as well.

Dr. Kara Fitzgerald: Yeah. And we talked on the webinar actually, a really cool preclinical study you mentioned was crossing the blood-brain barrier, just the evidence for it really being able to enter the central nervous system, which is pretty darn extraordinary.

Siobhan Mitchell, PhD: Yeah, and this is something that think CoQ10 has a lot of trouble doing. When CoQ10 was being looked at for Parkinson’s and other types of brain diseases, I don’t think it worked that well. But, for instance, we have data already showing that MitoQ can improve memory in people who don’t even really have actual cognitive decline yet, but just maybe the early stages. So yeah, that study is coming out this year and I would say there’s a lot of interest in MitoQ for all sorts of different brain dysfunction, including mood disorders, but especially around the neurodegenerative diseases.

Dr. Kara Fitzgerald: Absolutely extraordinary. Very exciting stuff. Was there anything else on the origin story that you wanted to talk about or let’s start to move in to talk about the research. But yeah, go ahead.

Siobhan Mitchell, PhD: Yeah, I guess the one other thing I just want to say about the origin story was that after this amazing molecule was invented, over 20 years ago, you can picture it just kind of sat around. It wasn’t really being used for anything in particular, and I think this is because New Zealand, and MitoQ the company, is just so small, right? So we don’t always have that big global platform to work with. And because this is a patented molecule— I don’t know if I made that really clear— It was invented in New Zealand and then the patent was obtained by the company MitoQ. It’s just us talking about it. It’s not like NR or these other longevity molecules where there’s a ton of different companies that are talking about them, so we’ve had trouble getting the word out.

Siobhan Mitchell, PhD: But I believe this is where, as I said, we have so much research that we really have been limited in talking about New Zealand because there’s very tight regulatory laws here. We have found that going to the US, going to other markets, we can say a lot more about all these different benefits that I think people really raise their heads and kind of go like, wow, that’s pretty amazing.

Dr. Kara Fitzgerald: It is. I mean, I had a similar reaction. I have to admit, unfortunately, as much as I really try to stay ahead of the science, I didn’t have the appreciation for this molecule that I do now. And it’s been pretty game changing, not just for me. I’m now using it. And we should talk about dosing, by the way, because it’s very different than how we dose my CoQ10. I have it noted so we can circle back and maybe just touch on some of the therapeutic and some of the acute dosing that you mentioned on the webinar, that I think were so, so, important. A lot of people are coming to me now for longevity. I’m working with a lot of pretty savvy kind of biohackers and it has to be a part of their stack. It’s just an essential molecule and folding into that we’ll be just doing a good evaluation of mitochondrial health using these new labs, which I’m very excited about.

Siobhan Mitchell, PhD: Sure.

Dr. Kara Fitzgerald: Okay. Let’s talk about using it in heart health. Let’s get into some of the science.

Siobhan Mitchell, PhD: Yeah, we have a lot of studies in heart health. We have about seven clinical studies and hundreds of preclinical studies of heart health. And it kind of makes sense that MitoQ would work really well for heart health conditions such as peripheral artery disease or hypertension because of the fact that we know, for instance, the heart itself has 5,000 mitochondria per cell, right? So I think it’s the most jam-packed with mitochondria of almost anywhere in the body. But not only that, if you look at the vasculature, so all your vasculature that are getting so much damage and friction just doing their regular everyday things, they have very vulnerable mitochondria that need a lot of protection.

Siobhan Mitchell, PhD: What we are really interested in is how MitoQ has been shown to address the very, very early stages of heart issues, cardiovascular disease. And this is even before people are being diagnosed as anything. This is just healthy older people who are showing, for instance, I would say vascular decline. And one of the main things that we have seen again and again that MytoQ works on, is something called flow-mediated dilation. Flow-mediated dilation is probably not something that people know a lot about because it’s not a commercial test, but it’s really important for understanding what is the very origin of cardiovascular disease? When does it really start?

Siobhan Mitchell, PhD: So, this collaborator that we have, Doug Seals at University of Colorado, has looked at flow-mediated dilation as a way to understand how well are your blood vessels reacting to stress and how quickly can they release nitric oxide to bring you more blood for whatever you need to do, right? And we know that as you age, nitric oxide release becomes more compromised. We know that people are really excited about nitric oxide release as a way to get better power and, you know, better exercise performance. But what I think is not known as well is how much this gets compromised because of your mitochondrial dysfunction in your vasculature. So he’s been looking at this as just a really early way of saying, okay, who’s going to get heart disease if they have bad flow-mediated dilation, this bad nitric oxide release?

Siobhan Mitchell, PhD: And MitoQ was shown in a [3 month] study– so 20 milligrams of MitoQ given to, as I said, healthy older people that this low-mediated dilation, this ability to have correct blood flow and nitric oxide release was improved by 42%, which, when Doug Seals saw this was like, this is like reversing your vascular health 15 to 20 years. It’s like basically giving you back a younger vascular health kind of phenotype right away, which he had never really seen before. So he was really excited. He saw things like arterial flexibility was also improved, things like oxidized LDL was also improved, and then went on to show that, indeed, MitoQ can help with nitric oxide release as well.

Siobhan Mitchell, PhD: And since then, studies have built up on cardiovascular disease showing that it can help with improving inflammation so we can decrease isoprostanes, we can decrease MDA (malondialdehyde), and basically make it so your vasculature are more prone to better health, better able to get your blood to the places it needs to go. We’re very aware that if your vasculature is compromised in any way, especially your microvasculature, this can affect your brain function, this is going to affect your skin health, your muscle health, many other things.

Dr. Kara Fitzgerald: If it’s helping with oxidized LDL and some of the other compounds that you’ve mentioned, is it being looked at in individuals with established heart disease without atherosclerosis? I mean, this would be a fundamental intervention.

Siobhan Mitchell, PhD: Yeah, yeah. What is it being used for? I would say this is a really great biomarker to understand. Who is really at risk to have cardiovascular disease? Oxidized LDL basically means now it’s active, right? Now it’s probably prone to sticking to the walls of your vasculature and causing things like scarring and foam cell formation, which then can lead to atherosclerosis. So for sure, it is that early harbinger, and if you can control that you can control a lot of how your arteries will look within 20 years, for sure. I think this is a really important message about cardiovascular disease. It’s very, very important of just how do we talk about people thinking about this so early on? How do we get people wondering, is this something that I need to protect better at that early 30s, 40s stage rather than waiting for atherosclerosis to hit and you’ve already got calcified arteries and there’s nothing you can do.

Dr. Kara Fitzgerald: Well, I would also say, through a functional medicine lens, it would also be a part of the therapeutic intervention as well in somebody who comes to you with established atherosclerosis, you know, cardiovascular disease. This would be a piece. I mean, other things would also be involved and there would be medication and so on and so forth.

Siobhan Mitchell, PhD: Yeah, for sure, for sure. I think this is understood and we’ve had a lot of physicians tell us this, that MitoQ is really great at addressing inflammation and other things that are going wrong with your vascular health and that it can be used in conjunction with many different medications. And I think this is where we just want to have that feeling of like, if there’s something you can do now— You know, you might not get medication in your 30s for heart issues, but this is something you can do now.

Dr. Kara Fitzgerald: One hundred percent, and too many people are actually getting medication in their 30s. Another big issue in the vascular health arena that we talked about before is menopause, hot flashes. Talk about that.

Siobhan Mitchell, PhD: Yeah, true. Yeah, and I think now there’s an understanding that menopause is not just hot flashes and those are uncomfortable, but also this transition of how your health needs to be controlled. Because estrogen is one of those things that’s amazing for overall health. It’s protecting women against so many diseases when they’re young, like cardiovascular disease, diabetes, even the way fat deposition happens. But once you’re done with perimenopause and you’ve lost all that estrogen, you no longer have that protection. And you especially don’t have that protection for your vascular health.

Siobhan Mitchell, PhD: So once you actually hit menopause, suddenly everything starts to fall apart in terms of your heart health, things that you weren’t getting as much of as men, you’re going to start getting just as much of. And so we’re really excited to see that Doug Seals lab, once again, started to look at whether MitoQ could help women who had gone through menopause and were now showing those deficits in vascular health. And that flow-mediated dilation measure, that I just explained, was one of the best ways to see, because this starts to really start to fall very, very quickly after age 50 in women.

Siobhan Mitchell, PhD: What he saw was that when you give MitoQ, even acutely, so this is a large dose, it was 80 milligrams, but just one acute dose of MitoQ could rescue this flow-mediated dilation of women who are postmenopausal to the point where they look like women who are premenopausal. So it kind of gave them back that vascular reactivity, that vascular, sort of, functioning of a premenopausal woman. And we think this is really important because once again, once you lose that estrogen, there’s just a lot of things that start to fall apart in terms of your health and you don’t notice it right away.

Siobhan Mitchell, PhD: Even things like hot flashes, I think people think, that’s annoying to have a hot flash. They’re not aware that having a lot of hot flashes or night sweats is actually an indicator of dementia as you get older. So it’s literally just telling you that there’s something wrong in your brain as well too, having those deficits in estrogen and you need to do something about it now. We think the same thing about vascular health as well. Once you hit menopause you need to start taking care of it. And for sure, it seems like MitoQ might have a role.

Dr. Kara Fitzgerald: That’s awesome. Yeah, what isn’t influenced by estrogen? It’s favorable when we have it and unfortunately menopause is the age accelerant for us, as women. It’s an all hands on deck to minimize the negative influence of going through menopause. So the research I’m sure is just continuing in this arena. Do we at perimenopause… I mean, what is your thinking? Are we starting women on MitoQ? I mean, how are you translating this research from Sears’ lab? What are you telling clinicians?

Siobhan Mitchell, PhD: Yeah, yeah, exactly. Yeah. So MitoQ can help you before you go through menopause for sure. For instance, we have another study where MitoQ is given acutely at a pretty high dose of 80 milligrams to women who are sedentary, right? So they don’t exercise that much. And once they had that MitoQ, they actually had the flow-mediated dilation of people who exercise quite a bit. We’re actually even thinking about this kind of like exercise in a bottle. It’s basically making it so that you are now able to do exercise just a little bit more easily when you’re sedentary and you haven’t really gotten into that routine yet. So maybe MitoQ is this way to help you get into that routine because it’s going to help your blood flow. It’s going to help your muscle function just in that really early stages of like, I’m trying to exercise again. So we think that’s really important.

Siobhan Mitchell, PhD: But then in the flip side, we’re also aware that when you hit menopause, the benefits you can usually get from exercise go down. And a lot of people don’t know that. So once you lose estrogen, your vascular health is not going to benefit that much from doing exercise regularly. Other parts of you can definitely get exercise benefits. Don’t stop exercising. But just in particular, vascular health is not going to get as much benefits without that estrogen, kind of, putting that sort of extra sort of oomph. But MitoQ, interestingly enough, seems to be able to take the place of exercise that was helping your vascular health before and help your vascular health stay functioning at somewhat optimal levels. Some things might not work as well once you hit menopause, but MitoQ can definitely help.

Dr. Kara Fitzgerald: So MitoQ in conjunction with an exercise plan— I don’t want anybody to be thinking that it’s MitoQ in place of exercise— but you can get more bang for your exercise buck, it sounds like, when you’re postmenopausal, and likely before then as well. I mean, you’ve got some pretty cool exercise research.

Siobhan Mitchell, PhD: Yeah, for sure. We have a lot of cool exercise studies. Yeah. We have a lot of interesting things that we’ve seen with exercise. So for instance, I think it’s par for the course to say, okay, mitochondria– very important for exercise, right? So we know that if you have really good functioning mitochondria, you will have that better muscle function. So we’ve done a few studies, for instance, on professional cyclists and seen that they can also get a lot better power output from MitoQ. For instance, in one study we looked at cyclists that were a little bit older, but we wanted to understand how well did they recover from doing intensive exercise over six weeks. And we saw that MitoQ could help their muscle output, their power output, increase by 67% and we also saw that they could have better VEGF increase. VEGF is vascular endothelial growth factor that’s shown to be important for angiogenesis, so getting new blood vessels to your muscles, that kind of thing.

Siobhan Mitchell, PhD: And at the same time, we also saw that PGC1α was increased in men who took MitoQ. And what is really interesting about PGC1α is that I think it’s one of these lesser known longevity molecules. It’s kind of like a master switch for increasing mitochondrial biogenesis, for improving glucose use, and mitochondrial function overall. And so seeing this increase from MitoQ basically means that you are now putting a lot of things in play that will help your mitochondria. So things like AMPK, mTOR, sirtuins are all in this kind of pathway so we think that clearly, you know, exercise is doing that sort of thing too, but MitoQ can accelerate that. It can kind of synergize with it.

Dr. Kara Fitzgerald: MitoQ must be engaged in, not just sort of pushing mitochondria to work better, but in mitophagy as well.

Siobhan Mitchell, PhD: Yeah, and this is a really important thing because I always have to explain to people that targeting mitochondria is really good for your longevity, but not because you want to rev up your mitochondria. That’s not what you want. You don’t want it so that it’s just a crazy output of ATP. You want your mitochondria to run clean energy so that they can make the right amount of ATP, but not have as much oxidative stress while they’re doing it. So they’re kind of like controlled.

Siobhan Mitchell, PhD: Obviously, some oxidative stress is good for you in terms of signaling and stuff like that, but we know as you age, it starts to get out of control. We know that there’s so many stresses, there’s so many environmental pollutants, things like that, that can bring on more oxidative stress than your mitochondria can handle. We’re all about making sure your mitochondria can make the energy it needs without having damage ensue. So that’s how we picture it.

Dr. Kara Fitzgerald: You and I have dialogued offline about the fact that traditional antioxidants are not necessarily friends in anybody who’s trying to have a good health span and is engaged in exercise. There’s sufficient evidence out there to suggest that we don’t want to use traditional antioxidants when we’re actively exercising. We don’t even exactly understand. Can you just distinguish… I mean, as an active cyclist— My bike is right there— I have backed off of using antioxidants and I’m doing it much differently than early on in my career when we didn’t really understand this as well. Antioxidants can blunt some of the signaling that’s happening in mitochondria to turn on different cellular reactions and be damaging. So just speak about that. And that is not a phenomena that you see with MitoQ. In fact, you can take it at any time and obviously you’ve got a nice body research with athletes. Just speak to that.

Siobhan Mitchell, PhD: Yeah, yeah, for sure. And I know exactly what you’re talking about, those studies where giving a really large amount of vitamin E to athletes actually took away the benefits of exercise. So it actually took away the increased insulin sensitivity that they were seeing and the increased muscle output. And this is because, as you say, just these generalized antioxidants that just go everywhere in the cell are turning on a lot of pathways that blunt that special kind of, I would say, oxidative stress, kind of like, all right, let’s make ourselves more resilient pathway, which you want to have, you know, to have those benefits from exercise. And what’s nice about MitoQ is that because it’s so targeted to the mitochondria, to this oxidative stress pathway, it’s actually helping make exercise make you more resilient and it’s doing it through, as I said, these pathways that are these natural antioxidant kind of enzymes like SOD, like glutathione peroxidase that get elevated by MitoQ.

Siobhan Mitchell, PhD: So now you’re actually having your muscles getting more resilient and getting better able to generate a huge amount of ATP without having anything bad happen to them. And then there’s actually one kind of cool study that I just want to highlight where, for instance, in just three weeks of MitoQ, people who are doing really intensive exercise were seeing that their DNA were getting damaged both in their nucleus and their mitochondria, but fascinatingly, MitoQ could prevent that from happening. So it was actually making sure that your mitochondria were staying healthy while you did this intensive exercise.

Dr. Kara Fitzgerald: Very interesting.

Siobhan Mitchell, PhD:Yeah. You and I have talked about this. We have a lot of data showing that exercise plus MitoQ seem to be synergistic in the way that they improve your overall vascular function, improving your overall inflammation, and also just improving your overall exercise function.

Dr. Kara Fitzgerald: We’ll park as many of those studies as we can and the link to their institute over on our show notes, people, I know that you’re going to be interested in accessing these. In fact, there’s an interesting review corralling together the traditional antioxidants and some of the outcome data there that I’ll put my hands on and park it over on the show notes as well so you can see what we’re talking about when we are very cautious in using them. And I want to just point out when Siobhan says high dose vitamin E, you’re talking about maybe a thousand milligrams, if that. But in our world, that’s not necessarily that high. That’s within the realm of what some of us would prescribe. So I think it’s incredibly, incredibly important that we understand that. Those of us in the clinical trenches, prescribing antioxidants all of the time that they’re not necessarily the safest tools for us to be using with our patients. I will just pull all this together, just go over to the show notes.

Dr. Kara Fitzgerald: We’ve already alluded to when mitochondria start to dysfunction, but do you want to speak to that? I mean, if we’re diagnosing prediabetes, and I think that you’ve already made the argument that it’s a mitochondriopathy, you know, when we’re diagnosing prediabetes and diabetes in younger and younger individuals and kids, that there’s mitochondrial damage happening really early. But barring that, when do we see these changes?

Siobhan Mitchell, PhD: Yeah, I mean that’s the big question. And as I said, we just haven’t had a lot of the commercial tools to see this, but through preclinical studies I can tell you it happens really early. Just to give you an example, in rodent studies, again, it’s really clear that brain function, you know the amount of ATP that your brain can generate, starts to go down kind of in young adulthood. That’s been seen and we know that once that starts to happen that you have resulting inflammation, you have resulting protein buildup, and other things that start to go wrong. And this kind of makes sense because we know that the brain is a very vulnerable place, and as I said, anything that can get into the brain can sometimes be causing a lot of damage. For instance, you’re probably aware that recently there was some data showing that viral infections, so HSV infection, even flu infection, long COVID, can predispose you to dementia,

Siobhan Mitchell, PhD: There’s now this understanding that brain plastics are now much more of a thing than we realized. Did you see that study where they’re trying to measure how much nanoplastic was in the brain and it had increased 50% over the past eight years in actual human brains. For sure that’s causing damage and interestingly, we then saw that there was a preclinical study trying to see if you did have plastics being exposed to brain function, what did that mean? And it did mean that brain function started to go down. You had more oxidative stress.

Siobhan Mitchell, PhD: Interesting, something like MitQ seemed to reverse that, but I think it’s just really clear for all of us to be more aware that these exposures that are happening really early on can actually result in your mitochondria definitely having some damage incurred. Maybe not enough to start showing a lot of symptoms, but it’s bringing it along that, I would say, journey towards actual disease states.

Dr. Kara Fitzgerald: Well, and of course we’ve got meteoric rises in neurodevelopmental conditions that have mitochondriopathy as a really key mechanistic component– autism or ADHD or ADD, et cetera– early. And toxins, I think there’s documented toxin exposure. Increased incidence of various different kinds of toxins in these populations. Any thought, any research happening in pediatrics with MitoQ?

Siobhan Mitchell, PhD: Not yet for MitoQ, but I will tell you my PhD was on prenatal neurotoxicity so I am very well aware of all the insults that can happen to a growing brain that can then predispose it to all sorts of mood disorders, that kind of thing. For sure, it’s just something we’re going to have to be more more aware of as we basically are in a more polluted world that no one even seems to be able to understand where all the toxins are. I always get surprised when I hear about, for instance, like supplements that have high heavy metal in them and no one knew about it and other things in the air that we had no idea that were actually bad for us and we don’t know how to get rid of it. It’s too much to take in all the time and so this is why I would just counsel like find something that you think protects you.

Dr. Kara Fitzgerald: Yes.

Siobhan Mitchell, PhD: Find something that you think protects you from these kinds of things and that will help you. One area that MitoQ was very interesting and helpful was, I will say, infertility treatments. There’s a lot of interest in MitoQ for making IVF work more effectively and even ovarian reserves. So the idea that, you your ovaries are another area that is prone to a lot of oxidative stress and kind of premature aging. So it’s this organ that seems to age faster than the rest of the body. And this could be because of mitochondria and for sure, it seems that MitoQ can help ovarian function stay more optimal for longer.

Siobhan Mitchell, PhD: This is in preclinical studies. I will not say this is in human studies, but it is interesting seeing that kind of data coming out. So yeah, that’s another area that I think we’re starting to see the exposures of toxins having an effect on our fertility. I just went to the most amazing conference where there was even just a talk of the amount of plastics in our drinking water. We’re basically causing really high infertility levels in a whole population of rodents. And this was just kind of standard, acceptable levels that no city official would blink at, but clearly are doing something to these animals and could be doing something to humans.

Dr. Kara Fitzgerald: Yeah, no doubt. I think, to your point, we need to be protecting ourselves. There’s a there I always I always mentioned this guy Bernard Hennig. He’s a scientist out of University of Kentucky and I’ve tried to get him on the podcast. I would like to have him on our podcast. He’s just studying the mechanisms of toxin-driven damage and the influence that healthy dietary patterns can have on mitigating that. So to your point, using MitoQ as a protective element in an overall, you know, as healthy as possible lifestyle, I think it’s essential at this point. It’s just essential. Yeah.

Siobhan Mitchell, PhD: It’s absolutely essential because I really feel for the people who are trying very hard to have a healthy lifestyle, right? They’re doing the right diet, they’re exercising, but then how do you control everything you’re exposed to in the world? How can you, right? There’s a wildfire going outside your door. Do you just not go outside every again? I don’t think so. So you’re going to have to find a way to protect yourself against the fact that these are just everyday things that are a part of our lives.

Siobhan Mitchell, PhD: I want people to have answers. I want them to have an answer to, hey, I’ve done everything else. I’m dealing with my sleep and my stress and all that, but just these toxins, like, what do I do about that? So we’re really happy that people are coming to us more and more about MitoQ helping with pesticide exposure, helping with, as I said, heavy metals and all sorts of other kind of like food additives that are now being thought of as maybe not as good as they were. You know that that RFK Junior is very into that right now.

Dr. Kara Fitzgerald: Yes. Yeah, right, right, right. Well, and you know, again, something we were talking about offline before I hit record was the wildfires in LA, and there’s some data on MitoQ being protective here. Can you speak to that?

Siobhan Mitchell, PhD: Yeah, yeah, it’s really fascinating because we’ve had a number of different studies, all preclinical, because obviously who would do a human study exposing people to air pollution? But we have had many studies showing that when rodents are exposed to all kinds of air pollution— wildfire smoke, cigarette smoke, diesel exhaust— that mitochondrial dysfunction ensues. And it’s amazing where the mitochondrial dysfunction actually occurs.

Siobhan Mitchell, PhD: For instance, in one study, these mice were exposed to diesel exhaust and they started to show mood deficits, they started to show cognitive deficits, they had less ATP being made. And so, interestingly enough, when MitoQ was applied to these mice, it did rescue that mitochondrial function and it rescued the cognitive function as well. And I think I’ve actually even heard a lot of people complain that when they are being exposed to all that wildfire smoke that they feel that their brain function goes down. And it just, once again, makes a ton of sense. If you’re having that much oxidative stress happen because you’ve now loaded your brain up with all these pollutants, it’s going to be something that you can’t control that well. And so once again, maybe the thing to try is MitoQ. Obviously this has not been a human study, but it does seem to indicate that if it helped rodents, it could help humans.

Dr. Kara Fitzgerald: Absolutely, and it’s safe. It’s a safe molecule. Just like speak to that.

Siobhan Mitchell, PhD: Oh yeah, it’s so safe. Yeah. It’s, been used for 10 years as a supplement. Millions of people have used it, so yeah, we have loads of data on that for sure. And as I said, it’s just a good kind of insurance to have from everything else that you’re doing in your life to try to have a healthy life. This is another thing that can just give you that feeling of, all right, you know, I’m doing something that can protect me from the rest of the world.

Dr. Kara Fitzgerald: Sure, yeah. So my final question, and then I want to see if there’s anything that we need to touch on that you haven’t gotten a chance to that you would like to, is just like dosing information. And I don’t know if you can give me some studies and we’ll park them on the show notes, but generally speaking, we’re doing 20 milligrams. That’s one cap a day. And by the way, people, you take it in the morning away from food. You don’t prescribe it like you do CoQ10 where you take it with a fatty meal. You take this away from food. And 20 milligrams is the therapeutic amount. But you also have a handful of studies where this acute dosing of 80 milligrams or more for certain interventions. Is that mostly in the research setting or do I want to be thinking about that clinically? Because right now, really without exception, I’m using 20 milligrams for my patients. But just talk about that a little bit.

Siobhan Mitchell, PhD: Yeah, I think it’s interesting to get a sense that everyone’s different, right? We all have different ways we react to supplements. So we know that sometimes 20 milligrams is really the answer for people, but generally, it’s more the answer when you seem to have a health condition present, right? When you are showing that prediabetes or that hypertension or things like that. I think for maintaining general health, so things like wildfires, as we just discussed, general fatigue, maybe 10 milligrams will be enough. But once again, the main thing to suggest is just try a certain dose, wait for a while, two to three months, to see how symptoms are resolving or biomarkers are resolving, and then maybe go up or down based on how people feel.

Siobhan Mitchell, PhD: But the bigger doses, I would say, usually it shouldn’t be needed. MitoQ is a very, very powerful supplement and so that 80 milligram dose, I think, was a proof of concept kind of study. It was just sort of saying, Hey, let’s just show in the course of a few hours how much this effect of mitochondrial oxidative stress is affecting your vascular health. So let’s just show that. It’s still something where, you know, now that researcher who showed that is doing a chronic dosing study. He was excited to see that this worked so well, but he’s saying, all right, let’s now go do six weeks of 20 milligrams to see how well that helps with vascular health of postmenopausal women. That’s more of what I would suggest.

Siobhan Mitchell, PhD: I will say that we do have a few clinical studies that are using higher doses. We have a study in ulcerative colitis that’s using 40 milligrams. We have a study on mild cognitive impairment that’s using 40 milligrams. We have a study on peripheral artery disease, and that’s at [80] milligrams too, because we think those are the doses that you need for those kinds of quite serious diseases.

Dr. Kara Fitzgerald: Okay, well thank you for that. Okay, so 10 milligrams may be the appropriate starting point in an otherwise healthy individual. Good, all right, and then we can lean on some of the mitochondrial testing that you already outlined or some of our standard labs. Most of us are looking at oxidized LDL and some of the biomarkers you’ve mentioned thus far. What else, is there anything, as we had in the home stretch of the podcast that you want to leave us with?

Siobhan Mitchell, PhD: Yeah, I think that the main things are covered. I guess the funny thing that we always get asked is like, how come I haven’t heard of you? I’ve heard of nicotinamide riboside and I’ve heard of spermidine and I’ve heard of all these other things. Why haven’t I heard of MitoQ? And I will say, we actually have more research than nicotinamide riboside and spermidine and all these kinds of mitochondrial supplements or these longevity supplements.

Dr. Kara Fitzgerald: Yes. Yes. Way more.

Siobhan Mitchell, PhD: But as I said, we’re a very small company. We’re like a teeny, tiny, cute, little New Zealand company and I think we’re really just learning that we have to spread the word. You can’t just sit in New Zealand and expect people will find out when they go see the Lord of the Rings scenery and stuff like that. You need to go out and bring this understanding because we have had so many people tell us about the amazing benefits. Our customers are so excited when they find MitoQ. They’re like, I’ve had fatigue for years and now it’s finally gone away. Even the weirdest things, you know, things like with hearing issues or problems with headaches we have heard that MitoQ can help with.

Dr. Kara Fitzgerald: What about tinnitus? Has anybody looked at tinnitus?

Siobhan Mitchell, PhD: No. Interestingly enough, though, we’ve had people say that it’s helped a lot with that and we’ve had a lot of preclinical studies showing that it does help with age-related hearing loss. So yeah, it makes sense because anything where you have mitochondria, yeah, you might need some help with them.

Dr. Kara Fitzgerald: Super interesting. Well, I have to say that I just feel really excited about being able to be one of the voices that’s going to bring the science forward so that we get it. You know, we can distinguish what CoQ10 is and what MitoQ or Mitoquinol is and just really see… You know, to your point, I have people email me all the time, you know, my colleagues, and ask me about what I think about NAD, NAD precursors, and so on and so forth and there’s no doubt that I’m a fan. I think that there is a place for them. There’s a place for a lot of these longevity molecules that are really kind of sexy and getting a lot of attention.

Dr. Kara Fitzgerald: But I say, let me tell you about things that have a ton of data that we’re not using. I mean, these are the lowest hanging fruit and you guys are, for sure, one of them. So it’s just a great honor to be able to be asked to participate in the journey of giving a platform to this little baby New Zealand company and the good work.

Siobhan Mitchell, PhD: Well, I mean, this is the great thing about your show is that you do look for that new thing, you know, the stuff that has been missed that could be really effective. So we really appreciate that is your mission too, like what is out there that can make the difference. Yeah.

Dr. Kara Fitzgerald: So to be continued, to be continued. And yeah, thanks so much for joining me today.

Siobhan Mitchell, PhD: Thank you. It was a lot of fun.

Holding a PhD in neuroscience from SUNY Albany, Siobhan Mitchell has also completed a post-doctoral fellowship on brain aging at the University of Washington. She has over 15 years of clinical research experience, seven patents on mood and cognitive food products, and has authored over 50 papers on aging, brain health, nutrition, metabolic health and more.

With a personal passion for brain aging research, Siobhan has worked on metabolic and skin health, appetite, sports physiology and of cellular health –which she now focuses on as the Chief Scientific Officer for research-backed cellular health company, MitoQ – creators of the world’s first mitochondria-targeted antioxidant.

Email: smitchell@mitoq.com

Siobhan Mitchell, PhD

MitoQ

MitoQ Research and Clinical Trials

MitoQ’s Mitochondrial Collaborative Research Program

Research: Chronic Supplementation With a Mitochondrial Antioxidant (MitoQ) Improves Vascular Function in Healthy Older Adults

Dr. Douglas Sears and the Integrative Physiology of Aging Laboratory

Research: Mitochondrial-targeted antioxidant supplementation for improving age-related vascular dysfunction in humans: A study protocol

Study: Targeting antioxidants to mitochondria by conjugation to lipophilic cations

Study: Delivery of bioactive molecules to mitochondria in vivo

Study: MitoQ and CoQ10 supplementation mildly suppresses skeletal muscle mitochondrial hydrogen peroxide levels without impacting mitochondrial function in middle-aged men

Research: Preservation of Vascular Endothelial Function in Late-Onset Postmenopausal Women

Research: Acute effects of MitoQ on vascular endothelial function are influenced by cardiorespiratory fitness and baseline FMD in middle-aged and older adults

Study: MitoQ supplementation augments acute exercise-induced increases in muscle PGC1α mRNA and improves training-induced increases in peak power independent of mitochondrial content and function in untrained middle-aged men

Study: The mitochondria-targeted antioxidant MitoQ, attenuates exercise-induced mitochondrial DNA damage

Research: Links found between viruses and neurodegenerative diseases

Research Pending: Bioaccumulation of microplastics in decedent human brains

Preclinical Study: CoQ10 support for fertility in both men & women

Research: The MARVEL trial: a phase 2b randomised placebo-controlled trial of oral MitoQ in moderate ulcerative colitis

Study: Acute mitochondrial antioxidant intake improves endothelial function, antioxidant enzyme activity, and exercise tolerance in patients with peripheral artery disease

Blog: Is Mitochondria-Targeting the Best New Strategy for Longevity?

Podcast: p-Tau 217: The Breakthrough Biomarker Revolutionizing Early Alzheimer’s Detection

DrKF Clinic: Patient consults with DrKF physicians including Younger You Concierge

Bio Age Self Assessment Quiz

Younger You book

Better Broths and Healing Tonics book