Mithriel
Senior Member (Voting Rights)
I don't think there is a continuum of our disease, not with the healthy population at least. Everyone with MS has antibodies to myelin not present in the general population. How severe an individual's MS expresses is down to how many neurons are involved and which ones they are. In ME it is probably the same with cells where aerobic respiration is broken.
Type 2 diabetes is not a continuum, some people are born with a certain genetic makeup which handles sugars differently. This process can be overwhelmed by an amount of carbohydrates which a different pancreas can handled efficiently. There is a feeling in the diabetes community that the drug companies are interested in treating the disease rather than looking at causes. If they looked at the origins they could detect people in the early stages and prevent the pancreas burning out.
In ME there is always a sudden onset where something in the body breaks but the symptoms of that onset can be immediate or gradually get worse. The early reports spoke about subclinical or trivial infections leading to a gradual ill health.
In most illnesses there is a point at which they start, a cell becomes cancerous or a bacteria burrows into the stomach wall and lets acid in.
I'm not sure there is such a thing as "mild" ME. As we know more about the breakdown of aerobic respiration we will think about it differently. If we had a way of detecting whatever causes it people could monitor what they do to keep under their limit. Ironically, that would be more of a social issue as I can rest much more as an elderly granny than I could as a young mother!
We may reach a point where we can sort out what disease we all have and there will be no more "ME" as such, chronic fatigue will certainly be seen as a symptom and the cause found in each case, instead of being shuffled off as "ME/CFS" if you have it for more than 6 months.
Type 2 diabetes is not a continuum, some people are born with a certain genetic makeup which handles sugars differently. This process can be overwhelmed by an amount of carbohydrates which a different pancreas can handled efficiently. There is a feeling in the diabetes community that the drug companies are interested in treating the disease rather than looking at causes. If they looked at the origins they could detect people in the early stages and prevent the pancreas burning out.
In ME there is always a sudden onset where something in the body breaks but the symptoms of that onset can be immediate or gradually get worse. The early reports spoke about subclinical or trivial infections leading to a gradual ill health.
In most illnesses there is a point at which they start, a cell becomes cancerous or a bacteria burrows into the stomach wall and lets acid in.
I'm not sure there is such a thing as "mild" ME. As we know more about the breakdown of aerobic respiration we will think about it differently. If we had a way of detecting whatever causes it people could monitor what they do to keep under their limit. Ironically, that would be more of a social issue as I can rest much more as an elderly granny than I could as a young mother!
We may reach a point where we can sort out what disease we all have and there will be no more "ME" as such, chronic fatigue will certainly be seen as a symptom and the cause found in each case, instead of being shuffled off as "ME/CFS" if you have it for more than 6 months.
