Oxidative stress in exercise training: the involvement of inflammation and peripheral signals, 2019, Francesca et al

Note: abstract mentions chronic fatigue syndrome but I'm not convinced that they are referring to CFS as we understand it.

Paywall, https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/10715762.2019.1697438
Scihub, https://sci-hub.se/10.1080/10715762.2019.1697438

 

I had high oxidative stress on tests, the problem was that my antioxidant levels were very low/below normal.

 

I have never really understood what is meant by 'oxidative stress'. Chemistry is normally a subject that does not include the word stress, just things like acid and base and oxidation and unsaturated bonds and the like. Stress is a word mostly used in psychology. Selye introduced it into pathology but those of us who worked on such things later on found his concept a bit confusing.

And having worked in inflammation most of my life I never found a connection to oxidative stress. But maybe I missed something.

 

Markers never detected inflammation in my case. So oxidative stress status was high (when tested), but no inflammation.

 

As Midnattsol suggested, how do you know it was due to low antioxidant levels, rather than low antoxidant levels due to depletion by elevated oxidative stress?

That is because it is a biochemical phenomena, relating to the viability of cells when subject to elevated peroxides and oxygen radicals. The origin of the word stress long predates it's appropriation by psychologists and originally meant under pressure/tension.

The term inflammation is also used in a different way, referring to localised damage within cells, rather than a widespread stimulation of the immune system.

To find a connection between inflammation and oxidative stress, you'd need to specifically study a disease that is primarily caused by oxidative stress.

 

Yes, the word stress has a long-standing meaning in physics but it does not appear in either chemistry or biochemistry. I don't think the use in 'oxidative stress's anything to do with pressure or tension. The relevant measure is presumably relative concentrations of various species of molecule or radical.

There is vast literature suggesting that reactive oxygen species are 'bad' and involved in disease. Oxidative stress is almost always mentioned as if it were a 'threat'. But in the right compartments these species are presumably part of normal adaptive mechanisms. In themselves they have nothing in particular to do with cell viability one way or another.

I did my doctorate in the pathology of inflammation - I don't think either of these counts as inflammation to be honest. Inflammation is all about compartments and in the last forty years people have forgotten that and built theories that ignore crucial compartmental issues.

 

Indeed, it seems to have become a value-laden concept, like in psychology. I prefer to keep my biology free value-laden terms.

That is what people keep saying but I have seen precious little evidence fit being relevant to health and disease. It is one of the memes that has grown up since people stopped dealing with facts and started telling value laden stories!

That sounds like post-1980 immunology after which compartments got forgotten. Microcompartments are essential to all immunological processes. Complement does opposite things in intravascular and extravascular compartments. B cells do completely different things in half a dozen micro compartments within a lymph node. Reactive oxygen species do quite different things in different intracellular compartments.

I just don't think 'oxidative stress' has anything much to do with inflammation or indeed damage in real life medicine.

That is fine because within 24 hours of unfamiliar levels of exertion, and especially eccentric contraction, muscles fill up with macrophages and can be painful and even swollen and that is good old fashioned inflammation.

 

What I meant was that low antioxidant levels might lead to oxidative damage to the mDNA if I continue exercising.

I don't understand why I had the profile of someone who was malnourished when I following a healthy diet.

 

This is interesting. I'm not sure if it was already posted.

Purpose: Oxidative stress has been proposed as a contributor to pain in patients with myalgic encephalomyelitis/chronic fatigue syndrome (ME/ CFS). During incremental exercise in patients with ME/CFS, oxidative stress enhances sooner and antioxidant response is delayed.

 

I emaied the corresponding author:

I had not seen the paper mentioned immediatey above before doing so.
Reference 19 was a paper that dealt with overtraining and was immediatey after the comment on CFS.

 

Is there a theory or evidence that 'overexercising' may cause ME in the first place? Or perhaps it could be a contributing factor with a patient catching a virus?

 

It seems there are some similarities but we're talking about high-level athletes, the kind who train intensely 8-10-12 hours per day for months and months. But the similarities are not exactly solid and we are talking about a level of overtraining that is ridiculously beyond normal.

Otherwise I think it's just used as a crude attempt to justify the stupid boom-and-bust thing, nevermind that it's basically comparing the fittest people in the world at the peak of super high-intensity training with... microwaving a meal instead of eating a protein bar, or something. Not that this kind of absurdity has ever stopped someone arguing for their psychosomatic beliefs but that's where we are.

 

I think that athletes who continually push their bodies beyond their energy production capabilities experience what we do when we push our bodies beyond our energy production capabilities. The difference is they push a healthy system to its limits while we struggle with an energy production system inadequate to daily living.

 

The reason i ask is because people often say that their trigger in getting ME was a virus, but often said they had busy lives/stress of some kind whether it's physical or mental before they got ill and this contributed to getting ME in the first place.

I don't know if there is evidence for this or people would have got ill anyway regardless of their circumstances or is there an increased risk?, but it was a virus which was the trigger.

 

I think on that it's pretty much the same thing as with eating fast-food or something like that, it's just so common that you'll find it easily within any population. I think most people would say they're constantly busy in their adult lives, especially parents. I had a pretty easy life and I would have said that as well because I was doing many things I enjoyed. That's busy, but completely different from stressful to the point of being detrimental to health.

 

How often? I know of plenty of people who didn't lead busy/stressful lives in the year or so before becoming ill. All of this suggests that either the stressful life kind is a different illness, or a stressful life is merely a secondary factor that increases the risk.