Editorial: The Brain Under Fatigue, 2022, Niu et al

Does what is colloquially known as “mind over matter” have a neurological basis? If our body's muscles start feeling tired (peripheral fatigue), at what point does the brain start getting tired too (central fatigue), while we try to power through a task? As it turns out these innocuous-looking questions are challenging to study in the lab. The purpose of this Research Topic was to collect articles that capture an, albeit incomplete, snapshot of the state of the art in this emerging field that studies what it means to feel fatigued in health and disease.

This Research Topic includes six articles in total.

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Lastly, two papers in this Research Topic examined how different medical conditions could reduce exercise capacity, and by extension the ability to perform activities of daily living, by exacerbating fatigue. In the first of these papers (Rayhan and Baraniuk) [S4ME discussion thread here] subjects with myalgic encephalomyelitis/chronic fatigue syndrome (ME/CFS) and control subjects (34 ME/CFS and 24 controls, females 24 and 10, respectively) performed two submaximal bicycle exercise stress tests on consecutive days, bracketed by fMRI and other assessments, to identify objective changes of exercise-induced symptom exacerbation and cognitive dysfunction. The main finding of this study was that the dynamic increase in activation of the anterior default mode network node after exercise may be a biomarker of post-exertional malaise and symptom exacerbation in CFS.

Open access, https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fnins.2022.945527/full