Association of chronic fatigue syndrome with premature telomere attrition (2018) Unger et al

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/29486769
https://translational-medicine.biomedcentral.com/articles/10.1186/s12967-018-1414-x

 

Well i do feel old

 

@Trish - it's worth keeping in mind that this study used Fukuda and if I am not mistaken went further and used the Reeves criteria, so it is entirely possible that many of those included in this study had nothing like ME......

 

Have any studies been done that find pwME look about 10 years YOUNGER than their age?

 

The odd thing is the people who tell me this most often are doctors and nurses. I had this happen about two weeks ago when a nurse I'd never seen before looked at me strange and then had me verify my name and my age, at which points she said "Wow, you sure don't look your age." I even had an ophthalmologist once tell me during an examination, "My goodness, you have the retinas of a teenager." I should have said, "Yes, but he wants them back by 5 o'clock."

 

Oh s***
This is one study i hope turns out to be untrue
Secondly how is this possible for a psychosomatic disease

 

Me too. On good days, I look about 20 years younger than my birth age. Maybe it’s because I mostly stay out of the sun?

 

I suspect that getting very little sun might slow some of the appearances of ageing.

We're not a hard living lot generally.

There are also definitely a lot of strains related to ill health though. I wonder if this teolmere finding (assuming it's not just a fluke) represents something that might provide information on the cause of ME/CFS, or is more likely to be some secondary issue.

About five years ago I remember seeing a lot of people complain that research on telomeres and ill-health/life problems/anxiety/etc was being over-hyped.

 

I know 80-90 year olds with way more energy/verve/active life than I, so yeah, defo prematurely aging on the inside.
Had a doctor years ago suggest that telomere attrition was an issue for me, but of course there was no solution so I promptly forgot all about it.

 

Elizabeth Unger MD PhD. "Chief of the Chronic Viral Disease Branch (CVDB), Division of High-Consequence Pathogens and Pathology, National Center for Emerging and Zoonotic Infectious Diseases at the Centers for Disease Control & Prevention."

I saw Dr. Unger at the 2017 Invest in ME conference in London. I wonder if she'll be attending or possibly presenting this year?

http://me-pedia.org/wiki/Elizabeth_Unger

 

Even in my mid-20's people assumed I was about 10 years younger. In my early 30's a dentist perplexed me by scolding me for having the teeth of a 30 year old

That was all before I got sick. And I lived in rural Oklahoma for a couple years (lots of playing & working outside) and then Hawaii in high school. Had to avoid burning, but there was no lack of sun exposure

 

I easily look ten years younger than my age but I've spent most of the past thirty bedbound or housebound so I assume it's lack of sun exposure.

 

If I shave (rare event these days) it easily takes ten years off. Mostly because my beard is about 80% white these days.

Also, like Sasha, I have basically stayed indoors or under shade all my adult life.

 

I think I spent quite a lot of time outside both in good and bad weather throughout my life, including since I got ME. I used to get very sunburned/tanned, and still do a bit, but can't tolerate heat (or cold) so much now.

 

If we are hypometabolic, doesn't that mean our metabolism is slower, therefore we would age slower and look younger?

Anyway, FWIW, this blogger talks about Rapamune as an anti-aging medication.

"It is the particular action of inflammation against healthy, native tissues that is arguably the greatest source of metabolic damage in aging, and rapamycin may offer a particular protection against this destruction."

I'm currently taking Rapamune off-label for ME and have some improvement. He mentions other potential benefits...and side effects.

https://joshmitteldorf.scienceblog.com/2016/06/13/rapamycin-redux/

 

Yes, she is presenting at the conference this year: http://investinme.eu/IIMEC13-news-180104.shtml

 

In Osler's Web, Dr. David Bell is described as having noticed that his patients, and the patients of other ME doctors, had a "numb" and unchanging set of facial features that was characteristic of them. He called their faces "bland" and "lacking the vitality of expression." Called "myopathic facies," the condition is seen in other diseases, such a myasthenia gravis, and is described as an "inability to curve the corners of the mouth, due to muscle weakness."

Holding an unusually neutral expression (something I've been accused of) might be a subconscious reaction to a disease in which every exertion makes you feel worse.

If this persisted over a lifetime, I could imagine that it might make you look younger than you actually are simply because it would promote less creasing of the face. That, in combination with less sun exposure, might explain a lot.

 

I thought this passage from the "telomere" wikipedia page was interesting in that it mentions hibernation and C. elegans.

The bolding below is mine.

Given all that, you might think that telomeres should be lengthening, not shortening, in ME/CFS patients. Mady Hornig's work at Columbia suggested that, on average, the immune systems of ME/CFS patients were "in high gear" early in the disease, but then became "exhausted" later on. I wonder if telomeres might be shortening during an initial phase of unusually high activity, but then reconstituting during a later period of "metabolic suppression."