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I don't understand cell biology well but a problem with the sodium-potassium pump has been proposed by Scheibenbogen and it sounds like the kind of thing that can maybe explain the salt stress test results. Paper here: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC9733289/ I have no idea how a...

Possible but maybe the FOXP4 association is more with the subtypes of Long Covid that are quite distinct from ME/CFS, like hospitalized patients with severe acute illness that go on to have some degree of organ damage (in particular the lungs, which was highlighted in that paper on FOXP4).

Some more thoughts on why I think it could be genes related to recovery from exercise and stressors in general: The fact that ME/CFS is so poorly understood could be a sign that its origin is in human physiology that is difficult to measure or maybe hasn't been studied much. These recovery...

I felt like writing about this. In my opinion ME/CFS is probably a label for several different poorly understood illnesses that happen to share some characteristics and which do not yet have their own name. We might call them subtypes of ME/CFS. Then, in a ME/CFS cohort there is probably also a...

If I look at that study of asthma patients treated intentionally with a placebo and real medication, and then at CBT for ME, I can not see much of a difference. In the asthma study they recorded substantial improvements in breathing even in patients treated with placebos. The objectively...

Brian Hughes would also be a good speaker, with the right credentials.

@InitialConditions I think it's important to mention that the alleged positive effects may be an illusion of a biased clinical trial design. And how the systematic application of this kind of design has created misunderstanding of ME as a psychogenic illness, something reversible by a change in...

McArdle's disease has a characteristic "second wind phenomenon" where progressive fatigue and muscle weakness appears during the first 15 minutes of exercise but then disappear. The person can then continue exercising. This is because the glycolytic energy production is impaired. In ME/CFS the...

Knowing the specific pathways that contribute to causing ME/CFS could be very valuable.

Thanks. While the effect is larger than that reported by Wessely, this doesn't save the study because this is an unreliable and unorthodox method for attempting control for placebo effects. I'm not getting the impression that care as usual is generally a positive and helpful experience for long...

The reply seems to fall under the "admit the limitations of the study so you can't be accused of ignoring them but then act like they don't matter" category. Can anyone check if the results exceed the modest improvements that could be reasonably assumed to be merely a placebo effect? (yes I...

Interestingly FOXP4 is mentioned in one study on the genetic overlap between Ehlers-Danlos syndrome and long covid: https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2023.03.24.23287706v1.full (the EDS in that study appears to be a clinical diagnosis with dysautonomia plus hypermobility, not the well...

If you're curious what FOXP4 does: it's a transcription factor. That means it controls the expression of other genes. Little seems to be known about the exact genes regulated by FOXP4. It is known to play a role in the nervous system, and to also be expressed in the gut and lungs. I get the...

I think it's also a question of funding and putting in the work of replicating and refining the candidate biomarkers. If that had been done we might have a decent biomarker by now. It's the same with treatments probably. The orthostatic issues are low hanging fruit and that we don't have good...

Do you remember any details? I heard Ron Davis was given a NIH grant for studying the HLA genes and found some risk SNPs for ME/CFS. It should be published soon.

Rereading the article I get the impression that the author is trying to say something about the importance of mental health while not having a good understanding of things, and bizarrely picking the worst possible illnesses to use as background for this.

This is so common in these articles. They want to say it's psychosomatic, encounter criticism, then redefine their own position into some vague statement about psychological factors that's hard to disagree with even if one has to guess what is actually meant. Obviously sick people do experience...

As far as I know it's not uncommon for SNPs or genes to be associated with multiple distinct illnesses. Some illnesses believed to be distinct have also been recognized as being the same thing thanks to genetics research. In my opinion is the genetic risk factors for a complex illness like...