Oxidative stress in ME/CFS

[Violeta]

Posts moved from: Evidence of White Matter Neuroinflammation in [ME/CFS]: A Diffusion-Based Neuroinflammation Imaging Study 2026 Yu et al

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You may be right, it might be something that only occurs during the acute infection in infection-onset ME/CFS. But unless there was permanent irreversible damage (which I think we’ve already discussed ad nauseum across the forum and it seems unlikely), that’s not the state that drives decades worth of symptoms in ME/CFS. You could theoretically argue that understanding the initial “inflammatory” state, if it exists, maybe could be useful for understanding what comes after. My perspective is that it wouldnt be any more helpful than just focusing on the “what comes after”

I'm thinking about oxidative stress.

 

[jnmaciuch]

I'm thinking about oxidative stress.

In what context? I think oxidative stress gets tossed around often as a bit of a bogeyman. If it’s at all relevant here, you’d need to explain what cell types it occurs in, what maintains it for years, and how it actually explains the symptoms of ME/CFS.

 

[Violeta]

In what context? I think oxidative stress gets tossed around often as a bit of a bogeyman. If it’s at all relevant here, you’d need to explain what cell types it occurs in, what maintains it for years, and how it actually explains the symptoms of ME/CFS.

Do you know of any studies about oxidative stress with respect to ME/CFS?

First time I've heard oxidative stress with respect to ME/CFS called a bogeyman.

 

[jnmaciuch]

Do you know of any studies about oxidative stress with respect to ME/CFS?

The most recent one off the top of my head is in this thread:

Thread 'Oxidative Stress is a shared characteristic of ME/CFS and Long COVID, 2025, Shankar, Bonilla, Davis et al.'

May 6, 2024

Preprint, see post #39 for peer-reviewed version
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Oxidative Stress is a shared characteristic of ME/CFS and Long COVID
Vishnu Shankar; Julie Wilhelmy; Basil Michael; Layla Cervantes; Vamsee Mallajosyula; Ronald Davis; Michael Snyder; Shady Younis; William H Robinson; Sadasivan Shankar; Paul Mischel; Hector Bonilla; Mark Davis

More than 65 million individuals worldwide are estimated to have Long COVID (LC), a complex multisystemic condition, wherein patients of all ages report fatigue, post-exertional...

• SNT Gatchaman
• calcium glutathione gpx4 lipid droplets lipids mark davis metformin mitochondria oxidative stress reactive oxygen species ron davis sex differences t cells
• Replies: 46
• Forum: ME/CFS research

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I would take the author's interpretation of their data with a hefty grain of salt. And also note that "oxidative stress" in circulating immune cells doesn't tell us much about oxidative stress anywhere else.

First time I've heard oxidative stress with respect to ME/CFS called a bogeyman.

Yeah unfortunately it took me becoming a trainee scientist myself to fully realize I can't inherently trust the majority of the science I read (let alone what MDs, patient advocacy orgs, or other people on the internet have to say about it). Oxidative stress has become something that a lot of people will cling to as inherently bad and disease-causing, without much understanding at all of how it functions biologically. It's real, you can assess it in multiple ways, and also 90% of the time it doesn't mean what people claim it means. I've had the benefit of having my own assumptions challenged by Navdeep Chandel's work, a scientist at my university who's done more foundational work on oxidative stress than arguably anyone else alive.

 

[Jonathan Edwards]

Do you know of any studies about oxidative stress with respect to ME/CFS?

First time I've heard oxidative stress with respect to ME/CFS called a bogeyman.

Michael Maes has been going on about oxidative stress in ME/CFS for years. Others have invoked it. I remember it being all the rage 50 years ago. And never discovered why anybody was interested in it.