Environmental Exposures as a Potential Underlying Factor in Chronic Fatigue Syndrome; a Case Report (2017) Arseneau et al.

Environmental Exposures as a Potential Underlying Factor in Chronic Fatigue Syndrome; a Case Report
An Environmental Medicine perspective on a complex syndrome; Could toxic exposures be the cause?

http://www.journals.ke-i.org/index.php/mra/article/view/1573/1626

 

This is of interest because the patient reportedly improved substantially after moving into a cleaner home environment. We keep hearing stories like this one.

There is also a bit about SNPs of the patient

GSTT1 (Primary Glutathione biosynthesis): Null/Absent
GSTP1 A/G SOD2 (Superoxide Dismutase gene): C/T
CYP1A2 (Phase 1 detoxification): A/A
FUT2, MTHFR, SHMT1, MTRR (Methylation processes): G/G, T/T, A/A, A/G

 

I skim read the article. It looks, as you say, @strategist, like the home move was the most significant factor in this particular patient's improvement.

Also she had very high exposure to toxic solvents in her past, so may not be typical of most ME patients.

My problem with an article like this is that it lists a huge number of different treatments used, so there is no way of knowing which, if any were relevant to her improvement. One can be pleased her health improved, but draw no conclusions about the reason.

 

I hope more research is done on this topic. Or at the very least more awareness.

I improved greatly by doing a “ mold “ sabbatical as discussed in paradigm change. I stayed away for 3 weeks . After 2 weeks in the desert my cfs was in remission . Came back to NJ ill with cfs again in a month.

I was highly reactive to my old house and all my possessions. My sons psychiatric problems disappeared when we left our mold palace. He was diagnosed with add depression and was on 3 different meds. He went from a c student to straight A’s.
Trish I understand your skepticism. It took a year for my husband to believe this.

 

There are so many substances we must be exposed to in our modern world that we have not evolved to properly deal with. Some are already known to adversely affect us of course, and it is inevitably more issues will be discovered. Could ME be one of the things so implicated? ... I would not be surprised if that proves to be so, at least for a sub-group.

 

I am afraid that this is not research or even an 'article' or a 'journal'. The only references to this 'journal' I can find are comments about it being a scam. The abstract tells us nothing and for some reason the 'patient' becomes 'patients'. The paper cannot possibly have passed any meaningful peer review. Passing this sort of thing off as science seems to me dishonest.

 

But of course that only tentatively shows your house, or more specifically the mould in your house, was the problem.

 

Something I find a real problem is that the best way someone like me as a non-scientist would once have relied on to be confident of reading genuine science, would have been to go to "real" journals such as The Lancet ... but that has been shot to smithereens now.

 

There was never such a guarantee of reliability. The Lancet has historically prided itself on not being peer reviewed. It assumed that it was so important everyone would assume what it published was the best. It was never the case. But fifty years ago most articles submitted were of reasonable value, based on hard work.

Now it is a free for all. At the top you have dumbed down stuff churned out by a core of scientists who seem to think the object is to say the same as everyone else. At the bottom you have someone living in some obscure place called Walnut CA sending emails to anyone they can think of, inviting them to pay to have something published - whatever they like.

But it is not really that bad. It is not hard to tell when something is good quality. The abstract has no propagandist guff in it. It states methods precisely and gives specific results with numbers, not just p values. The conclusions are modest and appropriate.

Until fairly recently the major journals stuck to those requirements because they are the way clear thinking scientists can tell the paper is of interest. In the last five or so years even the major journals seem to have abandoned this sort of quality control. They have become money making machines to suit money making scientists.

But as individual readers we can still apply the old rules. Good papers still come up to scratch because they can.

And although things have got rotten even in premier journals there is still quite a big difference between a real journal and someone living in Walnut CA selling advertising space for alternative medicine practitioners.

 

My experience is just that my individual experience. There is a lot of bs posing as “ science.”

 

Most of this makes no sense at all. Genes are not represented by a single allele or pair of alleles. So they are referring to SNPs but don't say which ones, even though they need to list the SNP for the information to be meaningful.

Accordingly I don't think this team knows what they're doing, and they don't care enough to learn nor to be concerned by their own ignorance. And why did they switch the axes for one "before and after" graph, except to try to make it look different and more impressive?

This "case study" is just an advertisement for their clinic. I wouldn't go anywhere near them.

 

Ugh! We need good unbiased studies. True mold/ chemical avoidance is very unprofitable.
I did try to go to doctors and they are willing to “ treat” me with expensive unproven treatments. Not sure if anything worked at all except sleeping outside to avoid indoor “ air pollution “ whatever it is .

Therefore no magic molecule to solve it ( yet) . No money no interest.
If I could drug my way out of this I would. It is cold out here.

 

I read the article and two things stood out to me. The first was the TBI...

“2 years ago, headaches started
after a traumatic brain injury”

..and the second was a history of chemical exposure.

I am glad (n=1) found a way to improve.

 

My scepticism is about the claim that somehow by throwing a huge range of different treatments at an individual, and the individual's symptoms improving, that any connection can be made in any scientific sense between any of those treatments and the patient's health. This is not a scientific paper.

I am, however, less sceptical about the experience of many patients whose health improved dramatically when they moved away from mouldy houses - there does seem to be significant anecdotal evidence of allergic reaction or toxicity affecting some people.

 

https://www.smithsonianmag.com/inno...randparents-could-be-in-your-genes-180947644/

 

Doing more than one treatment at the same time can not tell wich one is helpfull.