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I suspect it varies from study to study. If you’re looking for a disease-specific biomarker then it might not be the worst thing to include people with other diagnoses in your controls. But specifically for exercise tests you would need to ensure that your hypothesis can still be tested with a...

I think people just default to that in contrast to their disease group. I doubt most studies who use the term are comprehensively checking someone’s entire medical history, making sure no underlying conditions were missed, and assessing specific reasons for low activity level

Yeah that's something that came up recently talking to some people doing exercise physiology--studies selecting for sedentary controls just tend to recruit people with a whole range of underlying health conditions (or skewing towards less diagnosed health conditions, if certain diagnoses were...

Yep, it's not very specific since we're only at early stages of trying to figure that out. The paper looking at cytokine-specific firing patterns is probably the most interesting leap forward so far. This recent paper seems to be a good marker of where we're at currently--trying to sort out if...

I think it's quite likely that those findings are attributable to acute infection, and I agree with the comments in that thread that it's a leap to attribute certain symptoms during acute infection to this specific finding. If there was permanent structural damage to the nerve causing weird...

Thanks for the input! So then the biggest issue would be finding relevant tracers. But maybe a standard TSPO tracer could at least show activated immune cells in proximity to DRG cell bodies or something like that. [edit: And that’s hoping it’s something that would show up outside of PEM, I...

I agree, though dorsal root ganglia would be interesting to look at if that was possible with these methods

I don't have any expertise in this but my guess is no, unless things advance enough to get to the resolution of the end of a nerve fiber and much more specific tracers become available (the ones used currently can really only measure non-specific metabolic markers of "activated" immune cells)...

There's been some really interesting work done on cytokine-responsive peripheral sensory neurons that mediate symptoms during infection. I've been going through this paper suggesting that the specificity of response to cytokines is due to receptor-specific changes in neuron firing patterns. I...

@Snow Leopard has talked about sensory neurons mediating peripheral fatigue during activity—they respond to metabolites generated from the exertion but there’s a possibility that the nervous system response is abnormal rather than the metabolic state they are sensing. Would anyone know if these...

Okay so in a previous study they ran this analysis and found that a combination of 4 features--2 associated with alternative activation and 2 associated with terminal activation--best differentiated LC and controls with an AUC of 0.785. They reran the same cohort with more markers specific to...

I think there's a mistake with Table 1--per the methods, it seems like there was supposed to be an extra table that showed demographics and symptom prevalence. The text says that one persisting symptom was enough to be labeled as LC, so I'm guessing it was a very heterogenous cohort.

I think you’re right about the units. If so, that puts these two cases in the same range as the non-responders in the fluge+mella study, and they both got substantial benefit from dara for life-threatening lupus symptoms. It's only case studies and there might be different disease dynamics at...

Ah thanks, weird that wasn’t specified on the plot. Just saying “NK cells” usually means a pan-NK marker

Also that study looked at CD16+ NKs which are a specific subset associated with greater cell killing functionality, not overall NK cell numbers. There were these case studies showing efficacy in treatment-refractory lupus, where lower NK cells are somewhat to be expected...

I have some reservations about the NK cell data in general. This paper measured NK cells in relation to Covid vaccine seroconversion. Plenty of people are falling below 125 there, so it seems that it's not particularly unusual to be at the "lower end" (the other categories besides healthy are...

You’re right, they did only measure those 5. The same companies offer microarrays where you can measure hundreds but if they listed the specific primers, they weren’t using one of those kits

I’m glad the paper included healthy controls. If the conclusion is that ME/CFS and LC don’t differ much from eachother across this battery of tests, I think it also has to be stated that neither group differs that much from healthy controls across all but maybe a few measures.

Without sharing too many details from my own recent experience that might be identifiable…. seconding this 100%. Any naive faith I had in the peer review process is long gone.

In the methods it mentions some kind of special FDR procedure specific to this type of imaging. What I’m still very unclear on even after going down a rabbit hole through references and analysis walkthrough is which tests were corrected together. Maybe that’s just because I’m very unfamiliar...