Incidence age is bimodal for [ME/CFS], with higher severity burden for early onset disease, 2026, McGrath et al

[Jonathan Edwards]

I feel as though I'm not understanding the full implications of the finding but I can't really put my finger on what I'm not seeing and can't currently formulate a good question.

That makes about three thousand four hundred and seventy three of us.

 

[Alinda]

Thanks that’s really helpful! Yeah, seems like there’s nothing to the pattern. If I have more time I can try to go back through historical record to see if there were recent policy chances but it probably won’t reveal anything

Yea, it's just very tricky if we do not know when people developed me/cfs. Maybe checking the total amount vaccinated for different vaccines per country makes sense, but it still wouldn't be helpful if a large amount developed me/cfs 10+ years ago..

 

[EndME]

Something I have been wondering about is whether susceptibility might cluster around a regulatory shift that works a bit like a software update.

We are very used to the idea that in other types of animals complete software rewrites are obvious. The classic ones are insects undergoing metamorphosis as pupae, re-writing the caterpillar as a butterfly and tadpoles being re-written as frogs.

We know that the immune system undergoes shifts in things like thymic education of T cells but that isn't really a re-write and the timing doesn't seem to fit. Puberty is a sort of software re-write and so is menopause but again, as already mentioned, these do not seem to fit too well with the apparent peaks. People talk of male menopause but it isn't that obvious.

I would not be suprised if there are some brain dynamics that experience some large changes in certain phases of life either.