Ubiquinol for energy and possibly moon face, the mechanism and what the research actually shows
Fellow Addisonian here. I had a conversation in the wild with another Addisonian in a JFK TIL comment section and realized I’d never shared this in the Addison’s community specifically, so here goes.
I stumbled on ubiquinol randomly and noticed two things: my energy seemed more stable, and my face seemed to gradually normalize the longer I stayed consistent with it. Turns out there’s actually a reason for both.
Daily steroids deplete CoQ10 in adipose tissue mitochondria. This has been shown in dexamethasone studies. The depletion causes oxidative stress, impairs ATP production, and suppresses collagen synthesis in dermal tissue. So you’re getting hit on multiple fronts at once, energy, skin structure, and fat metabolism, all from the same underlying mechanism.
Ubiquinol is the active reduced form of CoQ10. The distinction matters because your body has to convert standard CoQ10 before it can use it, and that conversion step tends to work poorly in people dealing with chronic illness. Ubiquinol bypasses that entirely and actually gets into the cells. There’s a placebo-controlled double-blind study where CFS patients took 150mg of ubiquinol daily for 12 weeks and saw improvements in multiple fatigue-related symptoms. CFS isn’t Addison’s but the mitochondrial dysfunction overlap is real.
The face stuff is where I can only speak from personal experience. I notice a real difference when I stay consistent, and the mechanism is coherent, but nobody’s formally studied it for moon face specifically. Worth being upfront about that.
Start at 100mg with a fatty meal. Some people doing heavier steroid loads do better at 200mg. Give it 4 months minimum. You’re waiting on cellular turnover, not a quick fix.
If you want to dig into the research yourself, search “dexamethasone mitochondrial CoQ10 depletion adipose tissue” for the depletion side, and “glucocorticoids collagen synthesis suppression dermal fibroblasts” for the skin side.
Worth a shot.
Study on autonomic nervous function/CFS:
Published in BioFactors (Wiley) by Fukuda et al. 2016: https://iubmb.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/biof.1293