this post was submitted on 17 Oct 2024
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science

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note: clickbait sources/headlines aren't liked generally. I've posted crap sources and later deleted or edit to improve after complaints. whoops, sry

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[–] [email protected] 19 points 5 hours ago (2 children)

I wasn't even aware of that. chronic fatigue syndrome was actually real.

I thought I was just like side- depression.

is there anything known about CFS?

what causes it or how long it lasts or anything?

I know nothing about it except for like a comedy sketch from the 2000s at some point.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 34 minutes ago

CFS is a syndrome rather than a disease because, until recently, it only presented as symptoms instead of as an identifiable problem with a person. I know that a some people who get diagnosed for CFS get later diagnoses as neurological disorders like multiple sclerosis.

It sounds like the more powerful MRI scanners are seeing inflammation in the rest of those suffering from CFS.

That would mean CFS is a lifelong degenerative condition.

[–] [email protected] 21 points 2 hours ago* (last edited 2 hours ago) (2 children)

Lifelong disease usually triggered by viral infections. Very functionally disabling.

Known immune abnormalities which seem to affect the brain and mitochondria. I think @[email protected] is specialised in it.

Also “chronic fatigue syndrome” was the name back when it was classified as psychological. Now that it’s classified as neuroimmune the name has been changed to Myalgic Encephalomyelitsis (ME) (Or ME/CFS).

As usual though for a medium quality source like ScienceAlert, the article is written by someone who has no specialisation in Long COVID/ME, or even medicine. So there’s a bit of oversimplification and overstating findings from one study in that article. Very few researchers think it’s a brain injury. Most think the immune system has been compromised (with some deficiencies and abnormalities) and it’s affecting the brain in unknown ways (hence the abnormalities found. It’s weird though because the immune system problems seem to cause some immunodeficiencies but also autoimmune reactions. They’ll need to be quite a bit more studies before we get a clear picture.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 52 minutes ago* (last edited 52 minutes ago)

Couldn’t have said it better. And yes, science journalism often is basically repeating and dumbing down what a study says, but in science, and especially in medicine, a lot of studies tend to be wrong, make false assumptions, or overstate their findings, while journalists tend to take them for their word. There’s a reason you hear of a new cancer treatment in the news every other week but few actually make it past FDA approval.

[–] [email protected] 6 points 2 hours ago (2 children)

wow, thank you so much for the detailed answer, I'm fascinated chronic fatigue syndrome turned out to be a neuroimmune disorder.

is ME genetic or do you just get unlucky as far as we know so far?

[–] [email protected] 1 points 24 minutes ago (1 children)

Seems like it generally just gets triggered by a viral infection, but obviously it's hard to find conclusive evidence for that as people get viral infections all the time and usually recover fine. In a way COVID was a useful 'experiment' where we got a lot of cases of people getting long COVID right after a confirmed infection (because everyone was getting tested, which you typically wouldn't do for your average viral infection).

[–] [email protected] 2 points 8 minutes ago

Yeah. Atleast 50% report an onset right after a viral infection. And it’s not impossible to assume the other 50% were caused by viral infections too but the patient didn’t make the connection. Obviously we don’t really know yet.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 1 hour ago* (last edited 1 hour ago) (1 children)

We don’t really know. But theres a giant GWAS (Genome Wide Association Study) called Decode ME with I think upwards of 25’000 pariticpants which is coming out in the next year. So we’ll know a whole lot more then. Hopefully it might lead to treatments.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 hour ago

thanks, I totally slept on those developments.

that is very exciting