In this interview I discuss the connection between Epstein-Barr Virus and Autoimmune Disease

You can listen to the interview above or read the transcript below:

Dr. Brady:  Dr. Hedberg lectures all over the place, a lot of integrative medicine conferences. He's published in many journals. He teaches advanced functional medicine courses with Functional Medicine Town, professional co-op and as adjunct faculty with Hawthorn University. Dr. Hedberg has found that many chronic diseases are a result of stealth infections and that's what we're going to focus on tonight. Basically, he's also formed a website and a community known as "The Infection Connection" and I'll have him tell you a little bit more about that later in the call. You can learn more at infectionconnection.net.

Nick's a good friend of mine. I've known him for probably, I don't know, over 10 years I would say. He has the perfect radio DJ voice, as I always say, and you'll hear in a minute. When you hear that voice, I didn't know this at first, I learned this only in few years ago, but it did not surprise me when I found out that he's quite an accomplished opera singer. Nick, do you want to do a little tune for us to lead off or not?

Dr. Hedberg: No singing tonight Dave, LOL.

Dr. Brady: Okay. All right.

Dr. Hedberg: Yeah. Yeah.

Dr. Brady: All right. Well, thanks for being on, Nick, I appreciate it.

Dr. Hedberg: Yeah. It's great to be on again.

Dr. Brady: Great. Well, let's dive right into the topic. We're going to talk a lot about thyroid issues and stealth infections. We're going to look specifically tonight at the connections between Epstein-Barr virus and autoimmune diseases. I know that Epstein-Barr virus is certainly not the only virus out there implicated as an autoimmune potential trigger. Let's explore EBV first, so just give us an idea how you first started making the connection between EBV and autoimmune diseases, and just lay the groundwork for us, if you don't mind.

Dr. Hedberg: Right. So the first connection in the literature between EBV and autoimmune disease was actually in 1971. So a little over 40 years ago when they found that patients with Systemic lupus erythematosus had elevated antibody levels to EBV. It was actually about 10 years ago, David, you were talking about the connection between Yersinia and thyroiditis and that just kind of got me into looking at this molecular mimicry. So I just started noticing patterns on blood chemistry in patients with autoimmune diseases like low white blood cell counts, and then the class that has got elevated lymphocytes and low neutrophils which is the classic picture for a chronic viral activity. So I was seeing that a lot in the patients with autoimmune disease.

The other thing that shows up a lot in these patients were chronic low-grade fevers, getting fevers of unknown origin. A fever is basically an infection until proven otherwise. Then one of the other major red flag was, of course, cancer, but in these patients, cancer was not suspected. There was something going on there causing these chronic low-grade fevers. And then just started doing more and more Epstein-Barr virus panels on the autoimmune patients and seeing them coming back positive, reactivation of the Epstein-Barr virus. And then when I started focusing on that, the viral activity, that's when we started seeing excellent results in a lot of these patients.

Dr. Brady: I see. Did you happen to hear my interview earlier this year, in January sometime, with Derek Enlander, by any chance, from Columbia?

Dr. Hedberg: No. I didn't hear that.

Dr. Brady: Well, many of you on the call may have heard that.