@Jonathan Edwards Ron is now saying that the metabolic signature in ME/CFS has some resemblance to diabetes.
I've been saying for a while that problems with blood sugar regulation seem to be common among patients. This could be low hanging fruit for a researcher. If I'm right then a 4-5 hour glucose tollerance test could be a good way to demonstrate that there is a problem.
I had a couple, possibly three, glucose tolerance tests early in the illness (nearly 35 years ago). I would get symptoms of low blood sugar (like shakiness) followed by symptoms of an adrenal response (pounding heart). Theses tests, however, were always within normal limits. When I told the nurse about these symptoms after the test, she suggested that maybe my blood sugar had dropped and recovered between blood draws. Somehow this seemed kind of unlikely to me.
In retrospect, I've wondered if some autonomic glitch was overreacting to glucose levels that were within the normal range.
Something was odd with my tolerance of "sweeteners."
A couple of years into the illness, I drank a can of Coke on an
empty stomach one morning. The reaction was like
a massive amplification of what happened with the glucose tolerance test. Within 15 minutes, I suddenly felt a real sense of unease and shakiness and had to go lie down. Then I had what seemed like a massive release of adrenalin: sweating - deeply flushed face and torso - pounding heart - polyuria far in excess of the 12 ounces I had consumed - fluid seemingly coming up from my lungs - and a general sense of massive distress. On paper, it sounds kind of like an analphylactic reaction, but fortunately I didn't have any swelling or throat constriction. The episode lasted about 45 minutes to an hour, leaving me totally drained.
It took me a while to figure this out, but I would note all the ingredients on anything that I consumed that produced similar, though less extreme, reactions. The common factor was high fructose corn syrup (HFCS). HFCS had been been introduced into soft drinks in the early 1980's, just shortly before I became ill. It was later introduced into baked goods and I started to have reactions to them, too. Products I regarded as "safe," because they'd previously had no HFCS, suddenly produced reactions. When I checked their ingredients again, I found that they had begun to use HFCS. I was an HFCS "detector."
I'm not saying that HFCS causes ME/CFS, but ME/CFS may somehow make some people hypersensitive to it. I've read that reactions to HFCS should be impossible because it's chemically no different than regular fructose (just more concentrated, I guess), and the body is well able to deal with fructose. The recent interest in the microbiome makes me wonder if maybe it's not the body but rather some microbe in the gut that reacts weirdly to HFSC, producing who knows what (maybe just more of itself - upsetting the balance of the microbiome).
