The Australian TMAU Foundation 2nd Newsletter

Rob Brown is a well known Australian TMAU sufferer, especially on the Yahoo TMAU Forum. He has taken the initiative and started the Australian TMAU Foundation charity, which aims to help in research into TMAU. The website is currently being constructed at http://www.tmaufoundation.org.au/index.html

The 2nd e-newsletter has just being released, and includes intriguing information on research, as well as an emotional (and typical) story of a sufferer.

There is mention of 2 possible lines of research in Australia, and also it appears that the main TMAU tester in Australia (probably the Brisbane tester) only tests for Trimethylamine levels, and not Trimethylamine-n-oxide levels (the final product of correct FMO3 metabolism of TMA).

As Dr Christodoulou points out

[I]t should be remembered that excessive trimethylamine excretion may be intermittent, so a normal single result does not rule out the disorder. The diagnosis can be more firmly established by conducting a choline or marine fish load test, or by FMO3 mutational analysis. Currently, there is only one laboratory in Australia offering biochemical testing for trimethylaminuria,but we believe this is suboptimal because this laboratory does not routinely quantitate trimethylamine-N-oxidase, potentially missing cases of the disorder. Best practice guidelines suggest that both trimethylamine and trimethylamine-N-oxidase should be measured.