Hypoxia has delayed effects on the brain. Could this explain PEM?

I was browsing research and noticed that some harmful effects of hypoxia on the brain are delayed by days or even a week. The affected person appears to recover from the immediate effects but then has a delayed and marked worsening of brain health. This is in cases of major hypoxic brain damage which is not what is occurring in ME/CFS, but maybe PEM is a milder form. There are various findings in ME/CFS that are consistent with poor blood flow in the brain, oxygenation, or perhaps altered utilization of oxygen.

There might be a way to test if PEM is an oxygen dependent phenomenon by doing exercise challenge tests in a hyperbaric oxygen chamber.

 

Interesting and promising

The trio won the prestigious Lasker prize in 2016. In work that spanned more than two decades, the researchers teased apart different aspects of how cells in the body first sense and then respond to low oxygen levels. The crucial gas is used by tiny structures called mitochondria found in nearly all animal cells to convert food into useful energy.

The scientists showed that when oxygen is in short supply, a protein complex that Semenza called hypoxia-inducible factor, or HIF, builds up in nearly all the cells in the body. The rise in HIF has a number of effects but most notably ramps up the activity of a gene used to produce erythropoietin (EPO), a hormone that in turn boosts the creation of oxygen-carrying red blood cells.

 

That is very interesting. It is another of these things that is so obvious when it is discovered that you wonder why it was never thought of before. The body must have a way of regulating oxygen in the cell. We think of ME as being a disease of energy production but the switch to anaerobic respiration must interact with oxygen metabolism so this sort of research may say something fundamental about ME.

It would explain why we have so many body systems affected.