Altered sensorimotor processing in IBS: Evidence for a transdiagnostic pathomechanism in functional somatic disorders 2022 Schröder et al

Objective: A recent hypothesis suggests that functional somatic symptoms are due to altered information processing in the brain, with rigid expectations biasing sensorimotor signal processing. First experimental results confirmed such altered processing within the affected symptom modality, e.g., deficient eye-head coordination in patients with functional dizziness. Studies in patients with functional somatic symptoms looking at general, trans-symptomatic processing deficits are sparse. Here, we investigate sensorimotor processing during eye-head gaze shifts in irritable bowel syndrome (IBS) to test whether processing deficits exist across symptom modalities.

Methods: Study participants were seven patients suffering from IBS and seven age- and gender-matched healthy controls who performed large gaze shifts toward visual targets. Participants performed combined eye-head gaze shifts in the natural condition and with experimentally increased head moment of inertia. Head oscillations as a marker for sensorimotor processing deficits were assessed. Bayes statistics was used to assess evidence for the presence or absence of processing differences between IBS patients and healthy controls.

Results: With the head moment of inertia increased, IBS patients displayed more pronounced head oscillations than healthy controls (Bayes Factor 10 = 56.4, corresponding to strong evidence).

Conclusion: Patients with IBS show sensorimotor processing deficits, reflected by increased head oscillations during large gaze shifts to visual targets. In particular, patients with IBS have difficulties to adapt to the context of altered head moment of inertia. Our results suggest general transdiagnostic processing deficits in functional somatic disorders.

Open access, https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fnins.2022.1029126/full

 

This is what they mean by transdiagnostic: it happens in other diagnoses. You'd think they'd be more precise about that in the abstract.

Which the very same people would insist makes this non-specific, or even vague, and thus unimportant. Or, if convenient, "functional"/conversion disorder.

Which tells us exactly nothing since most of those diagnostic labels are used willy-nilly without any care. See one physician and they may say (but not code) fibromyalgia, another would say IBS, another would say fatigue or a bunch of other things, because this whole process is dysfunctional. The problem is not with the patients but how poorly defined and used the models are.

They'd find the same in pretty much every chronic disease where cognitive dysfunction is common. It would apply to MS and probably most neurological diseases. It would apply to many with cancer, before, during or after chemotherapy, where the concept of chemo brain is used instead of brain fog.

This is why building syndromes out of a primary symptom among many was always a terrible idea. They are simply mixing up concepts because of the obsessive need to give silo-based labels. IBS rarely happens alone, and is very common in post-infections chronic illness. Many long haulers had GI symptoms at first and this is one reason why it's so common to use antihistamines like Pepcid. About 1/3 or so of pwME have IBS, or something like it.

And of course inventing a solid dozen BS functional syndromes out of a single primary symptom is even worse. This is breaking Long Covid research right now, the symptoms are arbitrarily matched to concepts without any coherence, so much that individual symptoms are basically broken apart between various concepts, depending on who's looking.

Basically they are seeing brain fog but of course since it's not a concept medicine recognizes they have nothing to work with. Basic medicine was built with assumptions of neatly separated concepts with unique signs and symptoms. This is not always the case, in chronic illness it's basically the opposite. But the invalid model of reality is held up instead of actual reality.

Decades of mislabeling millions of people only lead to one outcome: a whole lot of mislabeling leading to a state of complete disarray.

 

This reminds me of "The Exorcist".

 

Sure, these "functional" somatic symptoms are quite possibly due to "altered information processing in the brain". But rather than "rigid expectations biasing sensorimotor signal processing", just imagine for a moment an alternative hypothesis: that they are due to quantifiable neuroinflammation / microglial activation.

 

One disorder, many flavors:

Functional fatigue. Functional GI issues. Functional headaches. Functional dysfunction. All the same to them, but given different labels to pretend otherwise.

Truly the biggest scam in professional history. It's one disorder, the conversion disorder, but it's so messed up that they can talk nonsense like transdiagnostic when they all mean the same and all the constructs are the same so they, surprisingly, overlap, to their total surprise.

Which is basically all as coherent as someone overseeing themselves, but that's basically how things work in BPS land so they can't even see it doesn't make sense, they never had to bother and no one cares anyway, it even helps keep it "mysterious" by being artificially confusing.