Trapped Neurotransmitters: How Iron Deficiency Overloads a Slow COMT Brain

Written By Malek Hamed, MD

In this article:

Why Anxiety, Insomnia, and Fatigue May Come from Hidden Iron-Based Catecholamine Overload

  • You already know slow COMT affects how you process dopamine and norepinephrine. But what if your body’s other clearance pathways are also blocked because of low iron?

  • This article shows how iron deficiency can impair MAO, leading to trapped stress chemicals, chronic overstimulation, and neurological burnout.

  • It explains why low iron doesn’t just cause oxygen-delivery fatigue but can also cause anxiety, sleep issues, and emotional dysregulation, especially in people with slow COMT.

  • Learn what to test (and why most iron tests fall short), how to identify the real issue, and how to fix it without making things worse.

If you’ve cleaned up your diet, supported methylation, and still feel overstimulated and exhausted, this may be what you’re missing.

THIS ARTICLE WILL BE AVAILABLE FOR 24 HOURS ONLY. AFTERWARDS, IT WILL BE EXCLUSIVELY AVAILABLE TO SLOW COMT ROADMAP MEMBERS.

“Wired but Tired” Syndrome

A surprisingly common scenario these days: anxiety, poor sleep, feeling overstimulated yet exhausted, "wired but tired," and daytime fatigue despite restless nights.

People with this pattern often get dismissed by their doctors. They get labs done, and the results come back “normal.” But deep down, they know something’s very wrong. Something is off in their inner machinery.

The medical establishment readily dismissed their situation, offering little more than a vague label like “chronic fatigue syndrome” or even a psychiatric diagnosis, ignoring the possibility of any potential organic cause of their illness.

But some patients dig deeper. They stumble across terms like slow COMT, and begin to suspect that their genetics.

But the real key is in the interaction of those genetics with other common modern variables.

One of the most common and unrecognized problems that interacts with slow COMT is iron deficiency. I’ll be addressing:

  • How exactly iron deficiency interacts with slow COMT variants,

  • How you can tell if iron deficiency is in fact the problem?

  • What you can do if you have both issues without making things worse.

 

The rest of this article is available exclusively to Slow COMT Roadmap members. Your first month of the Roadmap is FREE.

Want me to build you a supplement plan?

To work together one-on-one:

Keep in mind that this is not official medical advice. No doctor-patient relationship is established through this article or through any other information provided on this website.

READ MORE:

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~ Dr. Malek

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Dear Slow COMTer,

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Trapped Neurotransmitters: How Iron Deficiency Overloads a Slow COMT Brain
Trapped Neurotransmitters: How Iron Deficiency Overloads a Slow COMT Brain

Why Anxiety, Insomnia, and Fatigue May Come from Hidden Iron-Based Catecholamine Overload: “Wired but Tired” Syndrome.

A surprisingly common scenario these days: anxiety, poor sleep, feeling overstimulated yet exhausted, "wired but tired," and daytime fatigue despite restless nights.

Malek Hamed, MD

MTHFRSolve is my brainchild.

I’m an IFM-trained Functional Medicine physician with experience solving a wide variety of disorders still seen as mysterious by the modern medical paradigm.

I love solving those mysterious problems.

But doing so—I’ve found—requires two things that are, unfortunately, much too rare in our times: Authenticity and Depth.

MTHFRSolve is my way of giving you a little bit of that.

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