In this other video from the same congress, Dr Chris Kenedi explains how, according to him, Chronic fatigue is triggered by a virus in vulnerable persons:
Starts around 20:40
“This sort of explain chronic fatigue. You get these patients and they have this hyper arousal state they live, and they're very functional and they go through, they use this hyper arousal to their benefit. They're often quite high functional and engaged. And then they get an infection, a normal virus and that's what, you know, so many patients tell us “oh I was fine until I had this virus” and the virus becomes this key point.
And what does the virus do? it up regulates their immune system, the cytokine release goes through. They feel like crap, they feel all these pains because of this hyper arousal there. They feel more pain in every joints at a higher degree, and we know this from quite a few studies in Germany, that people with increased inverse childhood experiences, people with functional disorders oth feel pain at higher rates and can tolerate pain less than people without adverse childhood experiences and without functional disorders.
And the cytokine release and feeling like crap, and the joint pain and all the symptoms of the virus trigger their sympathetic nervous system, it triggers their limbic response, their fear response “maybe something bad is happening to me”. Their cognition is 'oh, I just have the flu, this sucks, I'm just down, I'm feeling vulnerable” But the emotional mind, the uncounscious mind is shrinking “alert, alert, alert, there's something going on, there's something wrong”.
And it triggers that sympathetic nervous response. And that over activate the immune system and leaves the immune system to secondarily lead to over response. And it leads to a disrupted feedback flow whereas most people, when the virus is gone, the immune system down regulates. But for some of these patients who get caught in this triggering system, they start to feed each other. And the nervous systme feed the immune system feeds the responses and the nociceptive systme and you're off to the races. And this never subsides. And they live in this constantly triggered state that they're responding to their environment in a way internally trough that hyper arousal; And that's an example of trigger on a vulnerable, vulnerale person.
And there's maintaining factors. They will have maladaptive beliefs. Maye they'll go online and they'll read about adaptive pacing or take it easy or go through, just the same way with ack pain, whereas we know that patient who have ack injuries who lie in bed are les likely to recover and tae longer to recover than patients who engage in motion. You get a similar kind of problem. These patients with fatigue and functional symtoms tend to engage in activities that maintain theit symptoms and maybe get unecessary labels and unecessary explanations and perpetuate these beliefs. And if they don't, we tend not to see them, right. So y definition, we're seeing the ones who are inherently oriented towards maintaining them”
And 7:50
"Key take home message to understand: what we've learned over the last ten or eleven years, primarily in Europe I have to say, is that all functional disorders are the same, that they present in different ways, but they're related to the same neuroanatomy and neurophysiology. It does not matter if you have chronic fatigue, fibromyalgia, chronic pelvic pain […] irritable bowel syndrome or gastroparesis. These are the same disorders that relate to disruption in the feedack system between the anterior (?) the prefrontal cortex and the lymbic system and the organs."
