Brain inflammation

I am fairly that brain tissue itself does not generate pain as a result of injury or inflammation to brain itself. Pain is usually ascribed to meningeal irritation.

Brain inflammation is one of the causes of raised coffee pressure, which produces headache worse in the morning but I don’t think there are any symptoms specifically due to brain inflammation (encephalitis). Most brain inflammation makes itself known by local signs of damage as in a stroke - weakness of limbs, loss of speech or vision etc..

 

Actually... the work of Jarred Younger finding lactate in the ventricles and other areas of the brain are suggestive of brain inflammation.

If you try to run a mile as fast as you can you will understand what lactate accumulating in the muscles feel like. I believe the same can be felt in the brain, if a patient with ME talks too much or cognitively over-exerts. While i cannot say for sure that this is brain inflammation, in my gut, I understand and i feel this is what happens. And in my view this is different than a simple headache or a migraine. Sometimes it feels like a brain cramp, usually in the evening after over-exerting.

I am hoping we can pursue research in that regard as this would provide much needed biomarkers and evidence of disability for legal purposes.

@Sallycatherineharris I’d also recommend you continue your process of being seen by a doctor, just to make sure it’s not anything else. Regardless, do make sure you rest and try to avoid exertion as much as humanely possible.

 

Well, I had those and still get the limbweakness during flairs.
I think it is the meninges doing its job that causes signal problems in the brain.

 

Definitely muscle weakness, vision issues and wordfinding ( and recently mouth working - muscles make it go " floppy"), breathing are all affected in PEM

 

Lactate is not a sign of inflammation. It is a sign of altered respiration. I think Younger has conceded that calling this inflammation may not be very helpful.

 

@JemPD Thank you for acknowledging. It was very very frightening. I was so sick. What made everything even harder was that I had severe insomnia as well so I had to suffer feeling all the severe symptoms all night long with only a few hours sleep, a lot of nights no sleep.

I should have been hospitalized with those head symptoms especially, but I was so ill and didn't want to be touched or talked to.

I never forget just how bad my ME can get and I get anxious whenever I start to deteriorate even now, 18 years later.

 

Thank you Jonathan, you are a tough cookie when it comes to science!
Here is what the Younger article said about Lactate:

 

I'm not surprised you get anxious at the thought of going back there! It makes me go cold just thinkin about it & I haven't lived through it. I just cant imagine.
I wanted to add the hug emoji here but it looks to 'smiley' to be appropriate somehow. But I'm sending a hug to you (if welcome I know not everyone likes hugs), i'm glad you're not there now & hope & pray you never go back there.

 

How are you doing @Sallycatherineharris ?

I know it's only been a few days but i'm thinkin of you.

 

@Jonathan Edwards, what does coffee pressure mean? When I googled it, all I came up with are descriptions of how espresso is made. Is this a British expression?

 

My spellchecker screwed up on csf pressure.

 

Yes, but this is not realistic. Lots of cells use anaerobic respiration - like cartilage cells for instance. Normal brain is aerobic but if there is more lactate then it is clearly not normal. The problem with blaming immune cells is that if there were enough immune cells (white blood cells basically) in brain to show up as a change in metabolism the person would be on a ventilator or dead pretty much. The brain does not tolerate white cells stall well. And if there were enough white cells to give a metabolic signal I am pretty sure an MRI scan would shine like a beacon. And ME MRI scans don’t.

 

Thanks @JemPD I know what you mean about the hug emoji being too smiley. I often don't like using it either for that same reason.

The exhaustion at the time of my severe onset was extreme, it felt like all the cells in my body were exhausted. My sinuses weren't functioning properly, so I had toxic stuff coming out of them burning all the way around my GI. I was on antibiotics for six months straight.

I had no idea I had ME in my earlier years so I was trying to carry on normally getting sicker and sicker, starting to experience severe bouts of PEM and then severe ME hit.

 

Do you feel there is any evidence of brain inflammation in people with ME/CFS that's driving our typical symptoms?

Bill

 

Not in any very meaningful sense of inflammation. There may be some microglial activation but I rather suspect that microglial activation in brain disease is an effect of what is wrong, not a cause.

 

What do you think is accountable for the incredible brain-fog so many of us experience?

By many measures, I was once considered a person of very high intelligence. Many days now I feel highly compromised. As if the impulses in my mind have to swim across synapses of heavily viscous fluid. And my head feels "pressurized."

I feel like something is very wrong with my brain. Not sure what that is, but it's not right.

I'm glad that there are clear thinking scientist-physicians like yourself helping us out and speaking the truth as you see it. I'm grateful for that.

Bill

 

If I knew the answer @Bill, we wouldn’t be in this mess!

 

https://twitter.com/user/status/1179892925200814080


Moderator note: For further discussion of this research see this thread:
fMRI cerebrovascular responses in CFS, Preliminary findings, 2019, Lara Mejia, VanElzakker et al. (Poster presentation)

 

Diseases like Alzheimer's and Parkinson's are now considered inflammatory diseases of the brain. I suspect eventually so too will ME/CFS