6 ms·

People talk about inflammation vs metabolism. They are linked. Inflammatory signals can turn cellular metabolism up or down. African sleeping sickness is an i

People talk about inflammation vs metabolism. They are linked. Inflammatory signals can turn cellular metabolism up or down. African sleeping sickness is an infection that results in a person going into a kind of coma. The parasite constantly changes its molecular interface with the host which is supposed to confuse the hosts immune system. This places a huge burden on the immune system and results in the host becoming hungry all the time, despite already being full. These patients will stuff themselves while growing progressively more tired. And eventually they fall asleep permanently. Inflammatory signals slow metabolism or something to that effect and this change in metabolism causes the body to feel as though it’s starved of energy and so the patients feel hunger. Inflammation and metabolism are linked. A man with schizophrenia was cured after a bone marrow transplant. The New York Times wrote about it recently. Symptoms of age including cognitive decline have been reversed in mice and humans through blood dilution/ blood transfusion probably due to reduction in the concentration of inflammatory molecules in the blood that are produced by ones own body. Inflammation/metabolism is the biggest medical revolution on the horizon. Especially since COVID has made it a grant-worthy topic now and doctors can’t deny that chronic fatigue syndrome is real anymore. It’s funny how all those people who insisted that CFS wasn’t real are now nowhere to be found to answer for their mistake.

erentz 5y ago
> It’s funny how all those people who insisted that CFS wasn’t real are now nowhere to be found to answer for their mistake. Oh a many of them are still out there. Now pushing CBT and GET as a cure all for Long COVID.
- circlefavshape 5y ago
  I have direct experience of this. My wife has had long covid for the last year, has had dozens of medical tests, and none of them have showed up anything except for POTS. I can understand why a neurologist would suggest CBT. All my wife's test results are normal, so the neurologist has no remedies available. People do get psychosomatic illnesses, and in those cases CBT does help. That doesn't mean that my wife has a psychosomatic illness, but there's no test for that either - can't hurt to try (FWIW this is not the way my wife saw it - she was pretty furious and felt like the neurologist was demeaning her condition)
  - tweedledee 5y ago
    I have hEDS which can cause POTS and had the exact same experience. The Golden Girls covered it over 30 years ago https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vVyLZTKDy2E https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vVyLZTKDy2E and it is still the default response.
  - garganzol 5y ago
    From your description I'm pretty sure she is thiamine deficient. Regarding POTS, that's just one of possible manifestations. And I saw more than one occurrence of POTS in people after covid. They all recovered after B1 in form of TTFD plus supporting therapy.
    - goodmachine 5y ago
      Links?
    - circlefavshape 5y ago
      I said she has long covid, including POTS, and apart from the POTS all medical tests are coming up negative/normal. You don't know what tests were done, you don't know any of her other symptoms. I don't understand how you can be "pretty sure she is thiamine deficient". If you are right and she can fix a year of misery by taking an over-the-counter supplement then I will be over the moon, but in order to convince her to try yet another remedy-suggested-by-someone-on-the-internet I'd like to hear more about your diagnosis
      - garganzol 5y ago
        >all medical tests are coming up negative/normal Indicating that this is a neurological problem. >you don't know any of her other symptoms I can only imagine as you did not communicate them. But let me guess: fatigue, brain fog, possibly panic attacks, tingling/burning sensations in feet or hands, limbs numbing especially at night, the sensation of suffocation or dissatisfaction with breathing, the sense of a blocked nose while there is no stuff in there, headaches, spatial disorientation, loss of short-term memory, impacted ability to speak and learn new things, GI and cardiovascular issues. All that while having a normal (>= 96%) O2 saturation in the blood. >I don't understand how you can be "pretty sure she is thiamine deficient". She may have an acquired mitochondrial dysfunction caused by the oxidative stress induced by the active phase of illness. Which is unfortunately pretty typical for Covid [1] and 30% of survivors will have metabolic and neurological complications as the result, regardless of the severity of the original illness. This is the first thing to check given the symptoms, but most of neurologists are unaware of it yet. You can do a formal test that checks for that condition: transketolase. I am also including some materials that might help: [2], [3] [1] https://journals.physiology.org/doi/full/10.1152/ajpcell.00426.2020 https://journals.physiology.org/doi/full/10.1152/ajpcell.004... [2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7UOyE-3PbJY https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7UOyE-3PbJY [3] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rjVXFqiPDwE https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rjVXFqiPDwE
fumar 5y ago
How do you influence inflammation to increase metabolism? Are you saying high inflammation increases cognitive decline?
stevehawk 5y ago
.. CFS is real? Honest question. I only knew two people diagnosed with it in high school and I would have attributed one to depression and one to a general inability to handle disappointment and thus mope around. Even reading the wikipedia page on it makes it sound like it's not 100% agreed upon as being real. Or is CFS now an acceptable term for things like 'long COVID' ?
- rincebrain 5y ago
  I don't think the framing of "real" or not is useful here - whether it maps to one or many underlying conditions (or even in the IMO unlikely event it always mapped to some other established condition), the symptoms are real for the people diagnosed with it, and unless there's a more useful set of criteria that match, it's reasonable to use as a shared descriptor. A few years ago, I had a fun experience - all of a sudden, I was absurdly exhausted (not just "tired", but "physically could not reliably get out of bed sometimes") from the time I woke up to the time I went to sleep, independent of how much I was sleeping (or the quality of the sleep), or what I ate, or [...]. I didn't have headaches, or fever, or anything else, I was just perpetually exhausted. As it turns out, I came back with a suddenly positive mono test where I had never had one before, and once a few weeks passed, it did too. But it gave me some reference for how it feels to be perpetually not just mentally but physically exhausted, with the potential of it never ending (since mono can have permanent repercussions, as someone I know discovered). I think "post-viral syndrome" is the term getting traction now for "long COVID" and post-mono consequences and the like, but AIUI the criteria are the same save CFS not requiring an infection as a trigger event.
inglor_cz 5y ago
"Symptoms of age including cognitive decline have been reversed in mice and humans through blood dilution/ blood transfusion probably due to reduction in the concentration of inflammatory molecules in the blood that are produced by ones own body." There is no probably here. The experiment is real and its results too, but the underlying mechanism is being hotly debated with no clear favorite. One of the competing explanations is dilution of badly folded albumine.
- aksss 5y ago
  Reduction in Complement 3C seems to be correlated with protection from Alzheimer's in mice[0]. Good news for Lupus patients (who typically have low 3C3). "Blocking complement function by deleting C3 rescues plaque-associated synapse loss in PS2APP mice and ameliorates neuron loss and brain atrophy in TauP301S mice, improving neurophysiological and behavioral measurements. In addition, C3 protein is elevated in AD patient brains, including at synapses, and levels and processing of C3 are increased in AD patient CSF and correlate with tau." An earlier cohort study[1] of nearly 100k humans said "Low baseline levels of complement C3 were associated with high risk of AD" 1: https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/30243924/ https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/30243924/ 2: https://www.cell.com/cell-reports/pdf/S2211-1247(19)30964-7.pdf https://www.cell.com/cell-reports/pdf/S2211-1247(19)30964-7.... The immune system is a crazy thing about which the medical community knows far less than one would think. There's some fascinating potential in there if it can be well-understood (not just 'hacked').

erentz 5y ago

> It’s funny how all those people who insisted that CFS wasn’t real are now nowhere to be found to answer for their mistake. Oh a many of them are still out there. Now pushing CBT and GET as a cure all for Long COVID.

circlefavshape 5y ago
I have direct experience of this. My wife has had long covid for the last year, has had dozens of medical tests, and none of them have showed up anything except for POTS. I can understand why a neurologist would suggest CBT. All my wife's test results are normal, so the neurologist has no remedies available. People do get psychosomatic illnesses, and in those cases CBT does help. That doesn't mean that my wife has a psychosomatic illness, but there's no test for that either - can't hurt to try (FWIW this is not the way my wife saw it - she was pretty furious and felt like the neurologist was demeaning her condition)
- tweedledee 5y ago
  I have hEDS which can cause POTS and had the exact same experience. The Golden Girls covered it over 30 years ago https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vVyLZTKDy2E https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vVyLZTKDy2E and it is still the default response.
- garganzol 5y ago
  From your description I'm pretty sure she is thiamine deficient. Regarding POTS, that's just one of possible manifestations. And I saw more than one occurrence of POTS in people after covid. They all recovered after B1 in form of TTFD plus supporting therapy.
  - goodmachine 5y ago
    Links?
  - circlefavshape 5y ago
    I said she has long covid, including POTS, and apart from the POTS all medical tests are coming up negative/normal. You don't know what tests were done, you don't know any of her other symptoms. I don't understand how you can be "pretty sure she is thiamine deficient". If you are right and she can fix a year of misery by taking an over-the-counter supplement then I will be over the moon, but in order to convince her to try yet another remedy-suggested-by-someone-on-the-internet I'd like to hear more about your diagnosis
    - garganzol 5y ago
      >all medical tests are coming up negative/normal Indicating that this is a neurological problem. >you don't know any of her other symptoms I can only imagine as you did not communicate them. But let me guess: fatigue, brain fog, possibly panic attacks, tingling/burning sensations in feet or hands, limbs numbing especially at night, the sensation of suffocation or dissatisfaction with breathing, the sense of a blocked nose while there is no stuff in there, headaches, spatial disorientation, loss of short-term memory, impacted ability to speak and learn new things, GI and cardiovascular issues. All that while having a normal (>= 96%) O2 saturation in the blood. >I don't understand how you can be "pretty sure she is thiamine deficient". She may have an acquired mitochondrial dysfunction caused by the oxidative stress induced by the active phase of illness. Which is unfortunately pretty typical for Covid [1] and 30% of survivors will have metabolic and neurological complications as the result, regardless of the severity of the original illness. This is the first thing to check given the symptoms, but most of neurologists are unaware of it yet. You can do a formal test that checks for that condition: transketolase. I am also including some materials that might help: [2], [3] [1] https://journals.physiology.org/doi/full/10.1152/ajpcell.00426.2020 https://journals.physiology.org/doi/full/10.1152/ajpcell.004... [2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7UOyE-3PbJY https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7UOyE-3PbJY [3] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rjVXFqiPDwE https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rjVXFqiPDwE

fumar 5y ago

How do you influence inflammation to increase metabolism? Are you saying high inflammation increases cognitive decline?

stevehawk 5y ago

.. CFS is real? Honest question. I only knew two people diagnosed with it in high school and I would have attributed one to depression and one to a general inability to handle disappointment and thus mope around. Even reading the wikipedia page on it makes it sound like it's not 100% agreed upon as being real. Or is CFS now an acceptable term for things like 'long COVID' ?

rincebrain 5y ago
I don't think the framing of "real" or not is useful here - whether it maps to one or many underlying conditions (or even in the IMO unlikely event it always mapped to some other established condition), the symptoms are real for the people diagnosed with it, and unless there's a more useful set of criteria that match, it's reasonable to use as a shared descriptor. A few years ago, I had a fun experience - all of a sudden, I was absurdly exhausted (not just "tired", but "physically could not reliably get out of bed sometimes") from the time I woke up to the time I went to sleep, independent of how much I was sleeping (or the quality of the sleep), or what I ate, or [...]. I didn't have headaches, or fever, or anything else, I was just perpetually exhausted. As it turns out, I came back with a suddenly positive mono test where I had never had one before, and once a few weeks passed, it did too. But it gave me some reference for how it feels to be perpetually not just mentally but physically exhausted, with the potential of it never ending (since mono can have permanent repercussions, as someone I know discovered). I think "post-viral syndrome" is the term getting traction now for "long COVID" and post-mono consequences and the like, but AIUI the criteria are the same save CFS not requiring an infection as a trigger event.

inglor_cz 5y ago

"Symptoms of age including cognitive decline have been reversed in mice and humans through blood dilution/ blood transfusion probably due to reduction in the concentration of inflammatory molecules in the blood that are produced by ones own body." There is no probably here. The experiment is real and its results too, but the underlying mechanism is being hotly debated with no clear favorite. One of the competing explanations is dilution of badly folded albumine.

aksss 5y ago
Reduction in Complement 3C seems to be correlated with protection from Alzheimer's in mice[0]. Good news for Lupus patients (who typically have low 3C3). "Blocking complement function by deleting C3 rescues plaque-associated synapse loss in PS2APP mice and ameliorates neuron loss and brain atrophy in TauP301S mice, improving neurophysiological and behavioral measurements. In addition, C3 protein is elevated in AD patient brains, including at synapses, and levels and processing of C3 are increased in AD patient CSF and correlate with tau." An earlier cohort study[1] of nearly 100k humans said "Low baseline levels of complement C3 were associated with high risk of AD" 1: https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/30243924/ https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/30243924/ 2: https://www.cell.com/cell-reports/pdf/S2211-1247(19)30964-7.pdf https://www.cell.com/cell-reports/pdf/S2211-1247(19)30964-7.... The immune system is a crazy thing about which the medical community knows far less than one would think. There's some fascinating potential in there if it can be well-understood (not just 'hacked').