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Certainly a confusing and wandering paper. My take away from reading for the first time is that there is some central issue but the authors couldn't figure out what they were and came up with some effort preference bs as a loose conclusion from the fmri and grip testing. I don't really know if...

Slightly off topic but I often think about how many other processes in the body could easily be thought of as functional if we had limited understanding of how they work. If we think about fitness I'd imagine FND proponents easily could have argued that being unfit is a result of poor system...

My problem with FND is when doctors and institutions claim that there is no physical or biological cause. The Mayo clinic's website states "Basically, parts of the brain that control the functioning of your muscles and senses may be involved, even though no disease or abnormality exists" Given...

I have never understood the software v hardware analogy. Do they think software is some magical entity that has no physical basis? Software is just the hardware arranged in a certain way to do a certain task. Messing with the software causes real changes to the hardware and visa versa. At the...

One of the studies I am more excited to see results from!

Yes I worded that incorrectly, I think the decline on a 2-day CPET is likely to be associated with PEM in people with ME. However, I'm not convinced that a decline in Vo2 max is unique to PEM in general as you can also see declines from dehydration and detraining (obviously over a larger period...

I think we can be fairly certain that Vo2 max and other CPET measures are not analogous to PEM. If a healthy control experiences a reduction in CPET parameters for whatever reason, it seems unlikely that they are in a state of PEM. For me PEM has always been more of a neurological phenomenon...

So ironic that he recommends something which he claims jury is still out on... Perhaps that shows he hasn't in-fact comprehensively looked at the data. If he had, he'd realize that the jury is not out because GET does not work :banghead:

"And now the brain goes into overdrive and starts over-interpreting even quite innocent stress and activates the pain" I've seen this kind of statement a lot but never any indication of what is actually going on. Are there any proposed mechanisms by which signals are over-interpreted? Why...

I will add that that study used a PET radiotracer that was developed in the 1980s and isn't as specific as the second generation ones that have been developed recently. I don't know how much of an impact that has on the results but it certainly provides a less clear picture. I would love to get...

Perhaps the act of death has a large impact on glial cells such that autopsies mightn't be the best way to study them. Apparently we can see large changes in glial activity in animal models of MS https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fncel.2020.00269/full but that wouldn't necessarily...

I really appreciate you pointing it out, it is my misguided assumption that the researchers would have a good understanding of the basics but I can see how that is certainly not always the case. It seems like researchers use neuroinflammation in a reasonably specific but non standard way. It...

We are only now starting to gain the tools that are sensitive enough to know what the pathology of less overtly severe clinical symptoms are. Newer generations of PET tracers, more advanced MRI methods like this one https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/35622913/ are how we actually determine if the...

This has always been bizarre to me. When I first got sick I had a Vo2 max in the mid to high 70s (as a lightweight rower). Now that I have ME and POTS my cardiologist asked me to get on the rowing machine for a few minutes a day even though I had an elite level of fitness when I first got sick...

The authors say "The ear lobe, which is devoid of vagal innervation, was chosen as the site of stimulation in the sham group. Patients were unaware which site provides active stimulation to achieve blinding of treatment allocation." Seems like any participant with the ability to search the...

I'm not sure if this answers the question but I did find this in a review paper titled "The semantics of microglia activation: neuroinflammation, homeostasis, and stress" https://jneuroinflammation.biomedcentral.com/articles/10.1186/s12974-021-02309-6 This work shows that immune cells (often...

That is one of the things I find compelling about this theory. It offers an explanation why a number of seemly different unconnected triggers (viral infections, vascular issues in Long Covid, chemicals in GWI, and physical damage in PCS) could result in smilingly similar symptoms. If these...

I don't know if I have missed something but it seems like there is much literature that certain viral infections can cause glial activation. I agree that in concussion the primary problem is the mechanical damage. However, I don't think we know what symptoms are a result of the mechanical damage...

This makes sense in some cases but surely it is possible to have changes in the brain that do not result in clearly apparent issues like hallucinations. For example when I had concussions playing rugby I never had hallucinations but I did have sensitivity to light, ringing in my ears, dizziness...

If the PET portion of this study https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2023.10.19.563117v1?ct= were to be replicated in ME, perhaps with a larger sample size, would that be good evidence that glial activation is somehow involved in ME?