Metabolic features and regulation of the healing cycle—A new model for chronic disease pathogenesis and treatment, Robert K Naviaux, 2018

Not specifically about ME, but includes CFS in the list of conditions considered.

https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S1567724918301053#tf0005

 

Fascinating and thought-provoking article. Very long and has some highly technical bits way over my head. However, well worth skimming over them to get to more interesting bits further down.

If Naviaux is onto something with his theory there would be two major plusses:
1/ It would apply to many, many other diseases including very common ones with much more research funding than ME. And research into any new treatments based on this theory would likely benefit both these other diseases and ME so we may be able to coattail on research elsewhere.
2/ The diseases affected, including ME, would be reversible.

But it's only a hypothesis, albeit a fascinating one, and proof of it or otherwise will likely be a long time off, let alone actual useful treatments.

 

Smart but in my case I will keep saying the causing agent is still present and can be activated by any stressor.

 

If anyone has the capacity to summarize in simple terms it would be much appreciated. Zero brain power.

 

But isn’t the point of this article hypothesising that the causal agent becomes the stuck on CD-R which is then activated by any stressor ( so there is no need for the originating agents to be present to make the new system vulnerable to worsening from ongoing stressors

 

No need to does not exclude there is.

 

Yes and from my understanding Naviaux’s hypothesis includes the suggestion that any initiating trigger likely needs resolving for CD-R problem to end

 

What I don't understand: Are these shown concepts, or are the authors showing proof of these concepts, or are they presenting a hypothesis about the "healing cycle"? The introduction reads like a textbook, but I am not sure if what he writes is really reality or thought.
Does someone know?

 

I don't have enough background to make any meaningful comment on the biochemistry, and perhaps that's cause enough not to comment at all. That said, my perception of Naviaux's Cell Danger Response model is that it's something of a pet hypothesis that he has sought to apply to other poorly understood conditions, including autism. The fact that he lists toxins and adjuvants at the 'CDR on' stage of his cycle in the context of applying CDR to autism gives me serious pause.

 

This is the presentation of a pet hypothesis that makes use of some reasonably well established steps but in a conceptual framework that is entirely homemade. In general teleological theories like this should be avoided in science. 'Healing' is a loaded term that implies good. But what we need is a theoretical framework that sticks to the actual events involved.

The idea that all diseases are somehow explained by this hypothesis is to me meaningless. They are explained by the pathological events we have discovered and in most cases these have nothing much to do with healing.

 

Regarding ME, healing seems to be an odd term - I'm not sure what there is to heal. It seems like one of the distinguishing features is that nothing is actually damaged. (Which is kind of nice because if we can figure out the actual 'blockage' - if it is a blockage - or 'mis-signaling' or whatever, and address that, maybe we'll all get turned right back on!)

This diagram reads similar to those that tout central sensitization; or 'conceptual frameworks' of some phenomenon in a psychology or sociology textbook that contain some solid aspects strung together with speculative yarn to suit a certain intuition about things.

Maybe you can overlay lots of illnesses onto this and say 'oh, yeah, that sort of fits, hmmm, yes...', but I'm not sure what good that does unless the framing provides a structure that helps people to work out the specifics of a given disease and to develop interventions - I guess I can't comment on if there is any potential promise in this or not, but it seems like it's not at a level of specificity where it could yield anything yet.
...Otherwise you're just hoping for a panacea and that seems soppy.

 

Very woolly and undisciplined...a sure sign that this will probably go nowhere unless he decides to gather actual proof by testing at least some aspects of this rather amorphous hypothesis.

There are a lot of papers I’ve noticed recently that are merely literature surveys with loose conjecture. This is not very helpful unless there are practical further studies that the authors or others can pick up.

I’m beginning to ignore what this guy writes....his style seems very self indulgent and with no sense of real life application. I have a feeling that he prefers writing and thinking to objective/goal based work with tangible results (unless it’s a necessity to get more money to do more paper churning of course)

 

@James Morris-Lent, you might try telling that to Jamison Hill and Whitney Dafoe.

Also not sure where you're getting the info that one of 'the distinguishing features is that nothing is actually damaged'. Could you provide a link for that rather odd claim?

Thanks in advance.

 

I agree with everyone else that’s mentioned it...”healing” is just a pants term and drips with woo and mystical clap trap ...

Perhaps something more specific would be appropriate? ...he’s a biochemist no?.....but I get the feeling that this is deliberately vague and ambiguous ...sigh

Pops another Mrs sowester magic bean ...just to heal my gut and cleanse my aura you understand...I will definitely need to wear a healing colour tomorrow and select my best mitochondrial healing crystal to wear to work.

 

@dannybex do you have candidates in mind? The only thing I'm aware of that might qualify is the recent brainstem findings (here).

Last I heard Ron Davis et. al were exploring, among other things, a 'metabolic trap' hypothesis to which any notion of 'damage' seems pretty tangential.

Look, here's my thinking on this, which is absolutely not the gospel:
-Clearly ME bodies are profoundly dysfunctional. So much so that quality of life can be much worse than for some other very nasty chronic diseases.
-Tests notably don't reveal damage to patients' bodily structures. Surely some individual patients have abnormal findings but there isn't anything consistent between patients.
-This combination seems 'distinctive' to me. It is my understanding that the tools/methods/frameworks we have available to us are pretty adequate for finding what could be reasonably called damage. So we should heed the findings. Certainly we are not there yet when it comes to identifying 'changes' that lead to profound symptoms, so maybe we should keep working on that. In the end, though, many things are possible because we're all in the dark.

I sincerely don't appreciate this.

 

That seems a very reasonable claim, @dannybex. The whole ME scientific community is pretty much agreed that we do not find any damaged structures in the sense that might 'heal'. Do you have a suggestion as to what might be damaged?

Looking at the diagram in detail it is a mish mash of all sorts of words that adds up to nothing as far as I can see. And inflammation and immunity was my field of work.

 

@Jonathan Edwards

We may have a higher prevalence of Liver Fibrosis, increased Total Bile Acids (=Cholestasis), NAFLD in ME/CFS Patients.(list not inclusive) .

I am trying to have Researchers investigate this.

Interestingly, despite the millions being spent in testing, a simple test such as Total Bile acids has never been performed in any of the studies to the best of my knowledge.

 

I do not know about fibrosis but a greenisch shroud on the stool together with a dry unproductive cough in the animals were the two sighns I had to start giving them levamisole.

The sooner I started the better the outcome.