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That the effect shown in mice may have nothing whatever to do with the origin of autoimmunity in humans. If you play around with mouse genes enough to generate autoimmunity through different mechanisms - which people have done for decades it is likely that all sorts of things will tweak that.

That sounds like food intolerance which can either be traditional allergy or one of the more 'innate' responses like the common responses to prawns and strawberries. Similarly for soaps and lotions etc. Lots of people have intolerances. MCAS is supposed to be some special abnormality of mast...

Such as? As far as I know the only autoimmune disease with reasonably good evidence of T cell drive is AIRE. Type I diabetes might be but I have yet to see a convincing story. The diseases clearly associated with T cells - and often MHC Class I - do not appear to be truly autoimmune, or at...

Because that is what the term was designed to mean. You don't suddenly say that 'horse' was originally designed to mean animals with hooves but now having wings is thought more important. Unfortunately, there are a lot of unscrupulous private physicians around who love playing games with people...

The paper is a complete joke, using an irrelevant mouse model. Forget it. We know why women have more autoimmunity - because they have two X chromosomes and that alters hormonal environment in a way that skews antibody repertoire. It is a no-brainer that women should have different regulation...

Yes, these things can in theory be measured objectively but maybe the problem is trying to devise an objective test for 'dysautonomia' rather than something more specific like these. I have never been quite sure what dysautnomia means. The increase in heart rate in POTS suggests that the...

Or a third way - which might be both - which is that 'dysautonomia' is not a well thought out term. Whatever the tests are measuring it does not seem to be what is bothering the patients. Rather than talk of dysautomnomia it might be better to stick to specific concepts like postural...

I have never heard that. Muscarinic receptor antibodies (and in fact all types of GPCR) occur in everyone and the general view is they don't mean much. A meaningful diagnosis of Sjogren's, as far as I am aware, requires either dryness or SSA antibodies and the central concept of Sjogren's is...

"Depending on a patient’s presentation and testing, the treatment recommendations below are those used by ME/CFS clinical experts to treat various aspects of ME/CFS" Let's face it, they are telling people that 'experts' use this stuff for ME. This is precisely the sort of eminence-based...

Oh really? So it's not so much that they don't work, more they were never intended to work? A complete con then? Well worth investing in.

But surely we should be very careful to deduce anything from that and it is no way a good reason for Bateman Horne to mention IVIg on a site about ME. If people with CVID benefit from IVIg, which is likely they do by general improvement in health from reduced infection problems, then if those...

Thanks, I found it now on the site. Bateman Horne shouldn't be putting out a great list of unproven things like that - many of which have significant harmful effects. Again, I think we need a level playing field. If we are to convince people that CBT and GET are worse than useless we need to...

Most pain around joints and ligaments, and indeed fascia is non-inflammatory. It is just due to friction, pressure or tension stimulating mechanically sensitive nerves. 'Myofascial pain' is a fashionable physio buzzword that does not mean much. But fascia can certainly hurt. The commonest things...

I am not quite sure why we get stiffer with time. Some bits of us, like skin, tend to get looser, but joints mostly lose movement. What is probably the main factor is that the bony rims of joints get 'gnarled'. You can tell the age of someone from their x-rays to within about 10 years just by...

Women are consistently more mobile than men. There are some bone profile differences involved - the female elbow bones allow more extension and produce a 'carrying angle'. The pelvis is wider, and so on. But ligaments are also generally a bit looser. This develops over time and is probably...

Being very bendy or having lax ligaments had previously been called hypermobility or benign hypermobility syndrome. This too got a bit muddled when Peter Beighton devised his criteria for generalised hypermobility. What got lost is that most people with real problems from ligament laxity have...

Hi @Michelle, Let me try to answer some of those. Is 'EDSIII/hEDS' actually EDS? It took me ages to work this out clearly but I now have. The idea of EDS is of one or more monogenic conditions in which a variation in a single gene in your DNA leads to abnormal connective tissue. It is strictly...

Hi @MountainRose We do not have any reliable evidence for a link between ME and immunodeficiency. In the past there was a vogue for calling it an immunodeficiency syndrome like AIDS but there was never a good basis for that and the claimed test findings have not been repeatable. IV...

I agree. Also, I suppose that the relation in healthy people is a different matter from the relation between one in one disease and the other in another disease.

The impact of TLR-7 malfunction is a very neat story. It may be worth noting, however, that it would make sense for this to be very specific to lupus, because of the link to nucleic acid scavenging (RNA/DNA).