Imaging glial activation in patients with post-treatment Lyme symptoms; pilot using CDPA-713 PET, Pomper et al, 2018

Another PET TSPO neuroimaging study suggesting neuroinflammation involving microglia, this time in PTLDS:

https://jneuroinflammation.biomedcentral.com/articles/10.1186/s12974-018-1381-4

 

No dramatically clear findings, but useful as "there's something here that needs further exploration". Their study was on Lyme, leading to a speculation about antibodies, but there are plenty of other possibilities for what they're actually measuring, so it definitely needs further exploration.

 

The suggested neuroinflammation was what I found intriguing - and how that could translate in ME/CFS TSPO imaging efforts (reminiscent of Nakatomi et al).

It sure feels like neuro-inflammation is at play. I noticed the study indicated that neurocognitive exams on the cohort of 12 demonstrated nothing out of the norm. I look at that as further indictment of conventional neurocognitive testing, and its unquestioned reliance in neurology and psychiatry and medicine as a whole.

 

Somewhat related: https://newatlas.com/biology/3d-brain-map-connectome-google-harvard/

"As well as showing just how incredibly well-connected neurons are, the images reveal some other unexpected sights. Some clusters of neurons seemed to occur in mirrored pairs, for unknown reasons. Others showed what the team calls “axon whorls,” where the long filament parts of neurons would form looped piles in a way never seen before. The researchers say it could be an unknown symptom of epilepsy, since the patient the sample was taken from suffered from the disease, or they could just be a rare occurrence in healthy brain tissue."

These newly-discovered axon-whorls might not be related to ME, but since they're newly-discovered, we don't know that they aren't. Maybe PWME have more or fewer of these, or maybe they're tighter or looser coiled, or thicker or thinner, and that makes them respond differently to cytokines or glial processes, resulting in abnormal activity, resulting in brainfog, lethargy, etc. What other features of brain cells are still undiscovered? Brain scans will "look normal" if we aren't looking at the right features. I'm guessing the PET scans do not have adequate resolution for identifying axon whorls or other such small features.