Orthostatic Symptoms and Reductions in Cerebral Blood Flow in Long-Haul COVID-19 Patients: Similarities with ME/CFS, 2021, Rowe et al

What don’t yet know is if Long Covid results in an assortment of cooccurring problems including ME/CFS, that is the original virus triggers conditions/symptoms only indirectly related to each other such as specific neurological damage or lung damage, which for some also includes the condition ME/CFS, or if it is unitary but distinct single condition that includes for some symptom overlap with ME/CFS.

Though this does raise the question why other viruses that not uncommonly trigger ME/CFS do not also seem to leave other long term symptoms in addition to the ME/CFS. For example do we ever see in people whose ME/CFS involves non specific ME/CFS symptoms in addition to distinct long term fall out from a triggering virus, so do those with an EBV trigger have general ME/CFS features and specific EBV consequences in contrast to those with an influenza trigger that have different specific influenza consequences.

 

In the 90's many living with HIV described post exertion/PEH malaise symptoms similar to M.E. Now they have medications that improve their quality of life.

The study I posted here was interesting.

 

I'd argue that there is every reason to believe that the same outcome happens from other infectious diseases, though probably to a different degree. It would actually explain so many things medicine doesn't understand. There is simply no health care system or research program that would be able to identify this, it would pretty much actually fly entirely under the radar precisely because the belief that this is not happening is preventing medicine from even looking at it, would not even acknowledge it if they saw it happening. LC is evidence of that, there is no amount of trees that make them a forest, it's all just trees with no relation to one another.

None of this is surprising, frankly. We just don't systematically track infections, the vast majority occur with no record. It's willful blindness over what is obviously the main cause of illness, it's not looked at because medicine doesn't want it to be true, would rather maintain the delusion of having control over our health over random odds that no one can control. Yet.

It's like physics in the early 20th century dealing with quantum mechanics and refusing to acknowledge a probabilistic universe. Maths is what made it impossible to ignore and end the denial. Medicine doesn't have anything equivalent to mathematical proofs, in fact there is motivated denial over this, bias preventing the work from happening. So medicine is basically stuck the way physics would have been if it had just refused to accept reality.

But of course this is mutually exclusive with the idea of psychosomatic illness. So the stalemate continues because the hopium is just too strong.

 

this is interesting. I never heard anyone in the 80s or 90s, before protease inhibitors changed the picture, describe their HIV-related symptoms in anything remotely resembling what I hear in relation to PEM. Fatigue, yes.

 

some ME/CFS patients, like myself, do find problems breathing in their symptom profile. I can't tell how common this is in ME/CFS: some people (ME/CFS community aware people) talk like no one has it and some talk like everyone has it. I'd like to see further study.

 

I echo this, actually, i had a hacking cough in the first couple of years i was dx with ME, also dx with mild asthma (i was very fit before) and curiously SOB if i walk, think and talk at the same time (likely due to OI/ POTS/ reduced blood flow) which still occurs to this day.

 

Like @WillowJ and @Milo I have breathing/SOB/air hunger problems. However, this is a ‘new’ symptom, started in last 2-3 years - usually involving stairs, steep slopes (we live on a ‘hill’ - I walk around the block sometimes) or after more activity than I can really manage.

ETA ‘Air hunger’

 

I also actually have it, although for me it is air hunger, a feeling of not enough air coming into my lungs even though I breathe normally. Of course it can get worse with exertion but that is not the source for me and if I have it then I have it even if I just sit and do nothing (once I felt I was going to suffocate just sitting on the bed). Talking makes it way worse. One of the best indicators for me that I'm having a better day is that suddenly I can breathe normally (meaning I feel that a normal amount of air fills my lungs finally). And then it surprises me because I'm so used to the somewhat milder air hunger that I have on most days that I don't realize it is happening. Well, now of course I do but I didn't in the past.

My lungs are of course perfect and my virus wasn't even a respiratory virus.