Hopefully it’s something immunomodulators can fix. Fingers crossed.

Probably triggered. But we don’t really know.

Hey I’m a researcher who works on ME (in the past called CFS).

ME/CFS is currently classified as a disease/biological illness according to the CDC.

ME is a disease state in itself. We don’t know much about it, but it can’t be explained by other diagnoses, as the defining factor, neuro-immune abnormalities including immune activation showing up post exertion is unique to it. You’re completely right that we don’t yet have a reliable biomarker. We have a test that differentiates from healthy controls, but it was discontinued for ethical reasons because conducting the test leads to a sometimes permanent worsening of the illness.

In the past it’s been mixed up and jumbled a lot, but the picture is getting clearer.

There have been a few case reports of degenerative forms of the illness. But in general it takes a more classical relapsing remitting pattern. Although even in less bad stages some patients are severely functionally disabled, even bedridden and tubefed. It has a really wide range of severities with the least severely affected able to work part time and walk and travel, while the most severe might not even be able to communicate.

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.

Well the problem is we know very little. So a movie like that would be complete guesswork.

You might enjoy the youtube channel “Stephan Milo” though. His videos are well sourced and have a lot of expert interviews. And he focuses on this kind of stuff.

Cool.

Title might be a bit clickbait though.

It’s oldest known representational art. Not oldest known art.

For example the carvings in the Blomos cave in South Africa are atleast 75’000 years old.

Edit: Thank you for editing the title! That’s pretty weird mistake by Nature I thought they had high standards. Well they have peer reviewed and approved some dodgy research in my field recently so maybe I should be more skeptical.

hmmm. To be honest, that’s an okay summary out of context, but it really fails to grasp the essence of the paper. It’s not wrong per say, but it adds irrelevant details while withholding key information. I wouldn’t rely on chatgpt’s summary for this.

There’s a feature of some Long COVID cases (~50%) which is also the defining feature of an illness called ME/CFS which has been caused by various forms of viral infections throughout history. (It is thought that a lot of Long COVID cases are ME/CFS). Anyways this feature is, Post-Exertional Malaise, a worsening of the illness after exertion beyond a certain threshold, which can entail hundreds of symptoms and be permanent.

This paper is a review of some of the biomedical studies looking at what could possibly cause this, and finds there is repeated data of Microvascular (blood vessels) and immunometabolic (metabolic markers relating to immune function) differences with healthy controls.

The leading hypotheses are that this is caused by mitochondrial dysfunction which is mediated by a dysregulated immune system.

Some of my colleagues were co-authors on this paper. I’ll forward the feedback that it is jargony.

That’s only in some schools of thought of psychology.

There are plenty of praticing psychologists and psychiatrists (some of my colleagues) who genuinely believe and publish research along the lines of “all mental illness are caused by thoughts and behaviours”. Research that in my opinion is heavily flawed, but still published and peer reviewed, so a lot of people in the field think this way.