Arthur T Knackerbracket has found the following story:
Imagine feeling horribly sick, day after day, yet doctors repeatedly tell you they can't find anything wrong. That typically happens to people with the mysterious illness commonly known as chronic fatigue syndrome. Research findings from Stanford University released Monday could point the way to a long-sought diagnostic laboratory test for the condition, and possibly a first-ever treatment.
Believed to affect at least a million people in the U.S., the condition is now increasingly termed myalgic encephalomyelitis/chronic fatigue syndrome, or ME/CFS for short.
Many patients see the name "chronic fatigue syndrome" as trivializing and misleading, giving the impression that they're simply tired or depressed. In fact, they're experiencing profound exhaustion that isn't relieved with sleep, flu-like symptoms, muscle pain, "brain fog" and various other physical symptoms, all of which characteristically worsen with even minor exertion. (A 2015 Institute of Medicine report proposed the name "systemic exertion intolerance disease," but it hasn't really stuck.)
The symptoms can range from mild to extremely severe, with about a quarter of patients so ill they're mostly or completely confined to bed. Now, the Stanford researchers have linked ME/CFS to variations in certain cytokines, immune-signaling proteins, that track with illness severity. The study results were published online Monday in the the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.
-- submitted from IRC
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday August 01 2017, @09:28PM (4 children)
For sure got a cure. Generic over the counter anti inflammatory.
No way no way. That would be too easy. Aspirin is an ancient drug. We need a money funnel.
I got it. Classify brain fog as a mood disorder. Prescribe ineffective cognitive behavior therapy.
Yes yes. We call this thing a mental illness. Then we can use involuntary commitment against sufferers.
Funnel the money!!
(Score: 1, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday August 01 2017, @09:42PM (3 children)
FUCK!! I was joking, but these motherfuckers are really doing it!
Psychiatrists are pure fucking evil.
Try the aspirin.
(Score: 2) by frojack on Tuesday August 01 2017, @10:03PM (1 child)
Is there a pill you can take to suppress the tendency to see a conspiracy under every rock?
From https://www.cdc.gov/me-cfs/treatment/index.html [cdc.gov]
No, you are mistaken. I've always had this sig.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday August 01 2017, @10:10PM
Nah, ya see, I have paranoid personality disorder which is treated with .......... cognitive behavior therapy?? Aw shit. Fucking psychiatrists' answer to every damn thing.
(Score: 1) by Ethanol-fueled on Wednesday August 02 2017, @12:31AM
So some people are just difficult assholes. I have seen this example used multiple times by people to justify their being difficult assholes before "Oppositional Defiant Disorder" was even a thing. One even blamed it on her family feeding her too many antibiotics as a kid.
My username may be ethanol-fueled, but I don't need a goddamn excuse to be an asshole, cocksucker.
(Score: 4, Insightful) by sjames on Tuesday August 01 2017, @10:10PM (5 children)
It wasn't that long ago that doctors were convinced it was a psychological illness or just plain malingering.
(Score: 1, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday August 01 2017, @10:56PM (2 children)
"Boss, I'm tired of being tired."
"Good news, you're also fired."
"But now how will I pay to see a doc?"
"Hell if I know, you lazy sack."
(Score: 5, Informative) by Spamalope on Wednesday August 02 2017, @12:42PM (1 child)
This exactly.
"yet doctors repeatedly tell you they can't find anything wrong"
Then HR: 'You're lying and taking advantage. If you were really sick you'd go to the doctor and get well.' - that's a quote btw... :/
Story of my life. Also harmful and nearly fatal medical directives, basically either 'don't try finding the causes of increased inflamation for you' and 'treat this as a psychological problem' when I was there with symptoms of severe sleep deprivation and mal-nutrition. My inflammatory response includes my intestines, which were so damaged they didn't work properly leading to significant nutrition problems. The muscle and joint pain keeps me from sleeping, in addition to the direct fatigue symptoms. Gastro DR told me not to do the 'cut out everything but rice and water, then add things back' dietary way to find food allergies. That directive almost killed me.
In my case I've got labs showing pathological levels of tryptase which indicates mast cell disease. (they're the immune system volume knob - mine is stuck around 7x the normal range) No idea why though. The limited treatments for that don't work on me at all. I was supposed to go to NIH (national institute of health) to be tested. My employer required me to have written approval for a leave of absence to go, then wouldn't respond. (see, saying no would be a violation of FMLA - but not answering at all while requiring a response to approve care - why that's ok...) This was just before Obamacare, and the DRs wouldn't/couldn't sponsor me to go after that and won't tell me why.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday August 02 2017, @09:51PM
look into the ketogenic diet. get a qualified nutritionist who won't recommend you eat poison laced grains. profit!
(Score: 3, Informative) by mojo chan on Wednesday August 02 2017, @12:34PM (1 child)
I have ME, and I can assure everyone that it's not psychological. There are psychological consequences of having it, sure, but they are not the cause.
It really sucks. I want to get up and do something, feel motivated... But then I get up and my body feels heavy and stiff and painful, and tells me I need to rest.
const int one = 65536; (Silvermoon, Texture.cs)
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday August 02 2017, @12:53PM
It sounds like being very hung over[1]. If a drug can do it to you, your body can also end up in that state other ways. It wouldn't surprise me if these are the same phenomenon.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hangover [wikipedia.org]
(Score: 1, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday August 01 2017, @10:24PM
Surely lack of sleep and activity needs to *lead to* altered cytokine/hormone levels, so I don't see how this is going to lead to either a diagnostic test or a treatment. Also, their analysis doesn't even include any assessment of how well their regression model can classify people having the disease vs not...
Why would you just look at each independently and arbitrarily filter out "non-significant" cytokines like this rather than use all the information? It makes no sense to do this. Just plug all the info into xgboost or whatever and see how well you can classify a holdout set if you want a diagnostic test.
(Score: 2) by kaszz on Wednesday August 02 2017, @12:08AM (13 children)
If constant inflammation is key here. Then that would suggest people get to much irritants inside them + stress and to little recovery (sleep) and exercise. So it might be that time to shed all those artificial food stuffs, especially syrup and sugars. Then throw out GMO and water contaminants (like PFOS). In addition get somewhere were work/life balance permits you to exercise and sleep properly. If your lunch cafeteria isn't providing proper food. Bring it yourself as a bonus their hygiene and cost is eliminated.
Anti-inflammatory like Aspirin maybe can provide a short term relief to get started on a better life.
(Score: 5, Informative) by RedBear on Wednesday August 02 2017, @02:34AM (7 children)
So glad you're here to solve the problem.
I guarantee you that the people who suffer from maladies like CFS, depending on severity of symptoms, have tried everything under the sun and then some. Long term use of any known anti-inlammatory like aspirin or ibuprofen has major side effects of its own, including lovely things like organ failure, bleeding ulcers and death. Many disorders like CFS seem to have an auto-immune component. Some minor relief may be found by trying to eliminate man-made toxins from the diet and environment as you suggest, but that is no easy task and ultimately there is no solution available for many people because we still have no real understanding of the cause. Even this article is only talking about a "link", not a cause or solution.
Oh, and part of your solution of course is exercise, yet exertion makes the condition worse. Third paragraph. Way to pay attention.
¯\_ʕ◔.◔ʔ_/¯ LOL. I dunno. I'm just a bear.
... Peace out. Got bear stuff to do. 彡ʕ⌐■.■ʔ
(Score: 3, Interesting) by Gaaark on Wednesday August 02 2017, @10:37AM (3 children)
But have they tried it for long enough?
We put our son on the gluten free diet due to behaviour/other (he is autistic). After a couple months, no change. After 6months, no change.
After 9 months, we could MAYBE see one behaviour lessened.
It took a full year to clear his system, but now he is completely different. No more laughing at nothing (the doctor says his system was changing the gluten into an opioid-like), no more regurgitation of food, etc.
I finally went gluten free for my stomach, and now I find my joints ache far less, but it wasn't immediate.
--- Please remind me if I haven't been civil to you: I'm channeling MDC. ---Gaaark 2.0 ---
(Score: 2) by mojo chan on Wednesday August 02 2017, @12:36PM
Believe me. I have CFS. I've spoken to a lot of other people with CFS. Everything has been tried, for years and years. There is no cure. At best you can learn to live with it.
const int one = 65536; (Silvermoon, Texture.cs)
(Score: 3, Interesting) by edIII on Wednesday August 02 2017, @08:43PM (1 child)
Your coming into this with your assumptions. Most of them not wrong exactly, but exhaustively tried. It's like your an IT guy and walk into disaster recovery 20 hours in, and start asking questions and making statements about how they could try what they already tried in the 5th hour. I appreciate and believe it comes from a good place in your heart, but you don't have any clue.
I've lived with it for about 10 years now. Everything that has been stated here I have tried. As for the gluten/GMO/sugar, I've largely succeeded with that. It's been about two years now, maybe more that I've been entirely gluten free. Already anti-GMO for many reasons, primarily the sloppy profit driven science and abhorrent intellectual property treatments. Nearly zero on the GMO. I'm really super stringent on GMO and HFS in the products I consume, and I was already that way 20 years ago. For a few years now I've been largely doing the Elimination diet. Did it pure and super strict for 90 days. I did feel better and started to shed weight. After a year I had reduced my body fat by half. The pain, neuropathy, brain fog, and fatigue didn't alter much at all. Heck, I even buy "organic" just to eliminate the poisons (pest control) and to try and lessen the negative effects it has on the environment.
Ibuprofen helped a little, but now there are studies saying that a few years on >1000mg/day will give you heart problems later on in life. Yay. So I can't use that. Aspirin is a fucking joke. Seriously, it made me laugh. Other than a small nightly dose for my heart when I can remember to get them, I don't take Aspirin. Yes, I tried it.
Life is pretty much endless pain. Oh yeah, the country is so completely fucked there exists really nothing to help me. I'm deliberately on medi-cal because I can't afford the >$1000/mo premium on my health insurance. That's assuming that they can do anything about it. My life is pain management, and I have severe side affects for all opiates except except the big one. That one gives me some side effects, but is manageable at half the normal dosage. It does relieve the pain, but that is because my whole body is fucking stoned. You can't live like that.
All I have is weed. That's it, and it's not a cure. There are side effects from prolonged daily usage, and going off it for a week is really hard on me. To the extent I can't work or function. So stiff and sore I can barely make it to the bathroom. Pain management really means years of suffering with no answers, while slowly degrading.
This is primarily why I'm leaving the U.S. Somebody like me has no meaningful assistance from the state, no hope of finding a cure, and the socioeconomic environment is purely anti-worker and filled with hate. Realistically, surviving in the U.S for the few decades I have left is too difficult because of this. I can't compete with other wage slaves for less than a living wage with a body that reminds me every second of its betrayal. It's not like anything is getting better for us, but in fact worse. Whatever health care bill is passed will be a monetary give away to rich people, which will directly result in less people being insured, less funding for people in my situation, and premiums so high that it only works when you are an employee with a large employer. That assumes you can even find a wage slave job, much less compete with the healthy 20 something applying for it as well. Since the majority of jobs are service work jobs, people that suffer from this have almost no chance.
Funny as it may sound, my future is better in the middle of nowhere where I can bond together with some people in similar situations and we can eke out an existence as farmers. Survival is simply more likely in the middle of nowhere than it is in the U.S in its current state.
This article gives me some hope, but as a person living in the U.S with it, we are still deeply fucked. Every night I get to sleep is a miracle that I made it through the day, how, I do not know.
Technically, lunchtime is at any moment. It's just a wave function.
(Score: 2) by Gaaark on Wednesday August 02 2017, @11:26PM
No, sorry: I wasn't criticizing or anything. I was just basically saying it because my wife and I have heard from parents with autistic children who say they've tried the 'gluten free thing' with their kid and saw no change, and made one of them stop and rethink doing it again when we said it took us a full year to see change (they'd tried it for 'a couple weeks).
No, I can't criticize. I'm pretty lucky health wise, and my son is sleeping pretty well now, so I'm lucky.
Hope some help comes for you somehow.
--- Please remind me if I haven't been civil to you: I'm channeling MDC. ---Gaaark 2.0 ---
(Score: 2) by fliptop on Wednesday August 02 2017, @12:05PM (1 child)
I know a few women who suffer from CFS / Fibromyalgia and all of them are picky eaters w/ horrible diets. They're looking for the "magic pill" to cure their malaise.
Our Constitution was made only for a moral and religious people. It is wholly inadequate to the government of any other.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday August 02 2017, @02:20PM
Of course everyone wants a "magic pill", but people would be incredibly happy if there were successful treatment strategies. So far, there really isn't any and there probably won't be for everyone since it is a very heterogeneous syndrome.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday August 02 2017, @09:55PM
excuses, excuses. stop eating pig slop, you jackass!
(Score: 3, Interesting) by Spamalope on Wednesday August 02 2017, @12:58PM (1 child)
In my case at least, there are adrenal symptoms.
Imagine I give you a big shot of adrenaline then tell you that you need to relax and calm down. It's not so easy then. Nor is it hard to understand why you'd experience stress in an amplified way.
Imagine that, say, I whack your knees with a bat 10 minutes after you fall asleep every time while upbraiding you for not getting enough sleep.
What if every time you exercise your muscles react as though you'd worked out to the point of total failure an hour ago or so, and that anything more than light exercise causes inflammation which make the result be weakening instead of strengthening.
Diet though - finding and eliminating foods that provoke the inflammation is helpful. Doing the same with environmental allergens helps too (mold/mildew for me). They're not a cure though. It's not so simple as diet.
Your body isn't having just one response though, and each category is itself complicated. (there is more than one inflammatory system/regulator, as this research details) Allergic and direct immune responses are connected too. The classic symptoms of a red lined auto-immune system, so you'll get the symptoms of lymes & lupus to a large degree (the immune system component is why those two share so many symptoms).
(Score: 2) by kaszz on Wednesday August 02 2017, @04:03PM
I don't think my suggestion(s) is a one magic cure. But a lot of bad issues comes from ingesting bad stuff, especially so over time. Constant inflammation is one of those things that tend to be affected by food and stress.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday August 02 2017, @03:02PM (2 children)
There's nothing wrong or harmful about GMOs. http://www.latimes.com/opinion/op-ed/la-oe-0412-miller-gmo-labels-unscientific-20160412-story.html [latimes.com]
(Score: 2) by kaszz on Wednesday August 02 2017, @03:57PM
Seems there's a lot of interest to claim there's no danger.
LA times like most media is bought and paid for.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday August 02 2017, @09:59PM
lisa simpson, is that you? we all saw your monsanto sellout episode already.
(Score: 1, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday August 02 2017, @06:22AM
Many MS patients suffer from similar symptoms. It would be interesting to see if this is also linked to MS.
MS: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Multiple_sclerosis [wikipedia.org]