What Causes Chronic Fatigue Syndrome
Scientists have been researching chronic fatigue syndrome for many years, but they still aren’t sure what causes it.
There may be more than one cause. And the different causes may interact with each other to bring on different symptoms in different people. Experts are studying potential triggers, which include:
- infections: Experts have wondered if infections like measles or Epstein-Barr virus might increase the risk for CFS. The role Epstein-Barr plays in CFS is not clear because studies have not confirmed it as a cause.
- emotional stress
- low blood pressure
Chronic fatigue syndrome can affect people of all ethnicities and ages, but it’s most common in people in their forties or fifties. It’s very rare in kids. A few teens do get CFS, and it affects more girls than guys.
Sometimes different people in the same family get CFS. This may be because the tendency to develop CFS is genetic, but more research is needed to see if this is true.
Treatment Plans For Me/cfs
Theres no single way of managing ME/CFS that works for everyone, but there are a number of treatment options.
The National Institute for Health and Care Excellence says you should be offered a treatment plan tailored to your symptoms.
Your doctor should discuss all of the options with you, and explain the benefits and risks of any treatment.
They should work with you to develop a treatment plan that suits you and takes into account your circumstances and preferences.
You may need advice about making lifestyle changes, specialist treatments, or a combination of both.
If your symptoms are severe, your doctor should ask a specialist for advice.
Your treatment plan should be reviewed regularly.
Home Remedies And Lifestyle
Making lifestyle changes may greatly impact how you feel, and the specific changes you need can depend on the severity of your illness and whether certain activities exacerbate your symptoms. While some people may see the tremendous benefit just from making changes to the way they eat, for example, others may find that more sweeping changessuch as a job changemay be necessary.
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What Is Chronic Fatigue Syndrome
Everyone will feel fatigued in their lifetime at one time or another. The problem with fatigue is that it disturbs your normal balance and interferes with your regular activities because you are too tired, too weak, and all you want to do is sleep, but sleeping is also hard to do regardless of the desire to do so.
Sadly, fatigue can persist for months to a point where sleeping and resting doesnt relieve the exhaustion. At this stage the nervous and immune system are already compromised. The persistent fatigue lasting for over six consecutive months is referred to as Myalgic encephalomyelitis or commonly known as chronic fatigue syndrome .
There is some association between chronic fatigue syndrome with post-exertional malaise which is characterized by the bodys inability to recover from exhaustion regardless of resting. PEM is accompanied by numerous uncomfortable symptoms which affect the physical, mental or emotional state of being.
Identify Treatments Youve Tried
In addition to tracking the symptoms you have experienced, keep a list of treatments you have tried. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention provides a medications and supplements list you can use to track your medications, their dosage, how well they help, and if you experienced side effects. Write a separate list of other treatments you have tried beyond medications and supplements, such as cognitive behavioral therapy, exercise, acupuncture, or meditation.
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Alternative Or Complementary Medicine
Since there is no standard treatment for CFS/ME, people often consider alternatives to traditional medicine or use non-traditional treatments to complement their other medications. Commonly used alternative and complementary treatments include:
- Mind-body treatments, like qigong, tai chi, and meditation
- Trigger point therapy, called myofascial release
- Chiropractic treatments
Complementary therapies have received mixed results when scientifically studied. Before beginning an alternative or complementary treatment, talk with your doctor to ensure that you arent trying something potentially dangerous.
Chronic Fatigue Syndrome And Fibromyalgia: New Leads
Chronic fatigue syndrome and fibromyalgia are two of the most difficult diseases to diagnose. When you go to the doctor with a variety of bothersome symptoms, you hope for an answera definitive diagnosis, so that you can begin whatever treatment is necessary to feel better. The good news is that most illnesses and diseases can be pretty easily diagnosed with a lab workup or other testing methods.
Unfortunately, though, there are some conditions that are outliers in this regard. Their symptoms are vague or could be signs of dozens of disorders. There are no reliable tests to diagnose them. Most are misdiagnosed multiple times before an accurate finding is made. And sadly, many patients are blown off, told their symptoms are psychological or all in their head.
Some of the most frustrating of these diseases are chronic fatigue syndrome and fibromyalgia. And science has recently identified a common link that just might pave the way for new treatments.
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A Reboot For Chronic Fatigue Syndrome Research
Name a remedy, and chances are that Elizabeth Allen has tried it: acupuncture, antibiotics, antivirals, Chinese herbs, cognitive behavioural therapy and at least two dozen more. She hates dabbling in so many treatments, but does so because she longs for the healthy days of her past. The 34-year-old lawyer was a competitive swimmer at an Ivy-league university when she first fell ill with chronic fatigue syndrome, 14 years ago. Her meticulous records demonstrate that this elusive malady is much worse than ordinary exhaustion. Last year, I went to 117 doctor appointments and I paid $18,000 in out-of-pocket expenses, she says.
Can Chronic Fatigue Be Treated
Every patient experiences chronic fatigue differently, and it is often accompanied other medical problems. It is essential to understand the root cause of each persons fatigue through a thorough medical history and assessment. Once this is done, a comprehensive holistic treatment plan may combine multiple therapies to address problems such as pain or depression, coupled with lifestyle changes, stress reduction, and other adjunct therapies.
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A Town For People With Chronic
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In December of 2012, I came down with what at first looked like a bad case of mononucleosis. I felt tired and had a sore throat, a cough, and a slight fever. At the time, I was twenty-six and working as an adjunct English professor at a small college in Westchester, New York. It was Christmas break, so I thought that I would sleep it off and feel better by the New Year. But over the next few months my symptoms grew to include muscle pain, migraines, and occasional vertigo. The cough went away but the tiredness got worse, and by the summer I was spending half my time resting in bed. I was used to playing pickup basketball several times a week after work, but now a few pushups left me exhausted. I couldnt figure out what was happening. One afternoon, as an experiment, I went for a run near my apartment, in uptown Hoboken. I clipped my iPod Shuffle to my mesh shorts and jogged past Italian delis with dry-cured sausages in their windows and along a pier that hugged the Hudson. It felt amazing. But the next day, while grading papers with a few other teachers, suddenly, I became dizzy and weak. I left the office without explanation, and, for the next several days, I barely left my bedroom.
A previous version of this story incorrectly described cytokines and misstated the location of a clinic dispensing Ampligen.
Case Presentation: Case 1
A white British female, now aged 63 , developed viral meningitis with accompanying vomiting leading to severe dehydration in 1988 when aged 33. She had previously been well and working as a general practitioner. Viral meningitis was diagnosed by lumbar puncture and again 6 weeks later on repeat hospital admission. She remained extremely unwell, being bed bound and unable to self-care, with profound weakness and fatigue, general malaise, light and sound sensitivity, repeated dizziness causing collapse, persistent anxiety and widespread pain. Although she improved slowly over the next 5 years, she was only able to return to work on a limited basis, still suffering headaches, fatigue, postexertional malaise and frequent migraine attacks characterised by vomiting and visual disturbances.
Following gastroenteritis in 1999, she again became bed bound and unable to self-care. Improvement was slower than the initial illness, and after 5 years she was still dependent on carers and used a motorised wheelchair when outside. She developed multiple food intolerances, shown on blood tests and confirmed by repeated withdrawals and reintroductions of intolerant foods. She showed a more dramatic response to wheat, even small amounts, characterised by nausea, severe headache, rapid heart beat and collapse within 10min of consumption, followed by a week of reduced energy and absolute constipation.
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Magnetic Stimulation Of The Brain
The rapidly evolving magnetic stimulation field holds the promise of safely and effectively turning down overactive parts of the brain involved in pain processing and/or ramping up parts of the brain involved in executive functioning
- Effect of Hypnosis Combined With Tdcs on Pain Perception and Cortical Excitability in Fibromyalgia hypnosis + transcranial direct-current stimulationInteresting!
Addressing Low Thyroid Hormone Function
In Prolonged Critical Illness
As described above , clinicians began, as early as the 1970s, to suggest thyroid hormone supplementation for critically ill patients. The rationale was to correct what some considered a maladaptive hypo-metabolic state which was preventing recovery following severe infection or injury . Again, this approach remains controversial . Interestingly, there has been little research into pharmacological agents to correct the peripheral mechanisms, which to a large extent underpin the low thyroid hormone function during critical illness: i.e., the alterations in cellular thyroid hormone transporters, receptors, and deiodinases that convert thyroid hormones into their active and inactivated forms. Targeting these deiodinases could theoretically be an avenue for alleviating low thyroid hormone function during prolonged critical illness .
In ME/CFS
As described above, there are accounts of positive effects of thyroid hormone supplementation to address low thyroid hormone function in euthyroid ME/CFS and fibromyalgia . Proponents generally believe that thyroid hormone supplementation serves to compensate for dysfunctions in the conversion of thyroid hormones and/or uptake at cellular level , notably associated with inflammation in ME/CFS or fibromyalgia .
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Common Drug Could Be A Simple Solution To A Complex Disease
A common drug could provide a simple but life-changing treatment for sufferers of chronic fatigue syndrome, world-first new research has discovered.
Griffith University researchers have identified in lab experiments that low doses of naltrexone reverse abnormal cell functions associated with chronic fatigue syndrome, which clinicians refer to as myalgic encephalomyelitis .
Myalgic encephalomyelitis, a highly stigmatised and misunderstood condition also known as chronic fatigue syndrome, can leave patients bed-ridden.Credit:Eddie Jim
ME is a complex disease that can present with many different symptoms, which meant it was underdiagnosed and misdiagnosed for many years.
It often leaves patients with extreme muscle soreness and fatigue, as well as extreme sensitivity to light and smells, among other symptoms. When the disease manifests, the lives of many sufferers are upended.
Griffith University professor Sonya Marshall-Gradisnik said their finding that naltrexone could treat the disease came on top of previous research also a world first in which the team proved that a defect in a specific ion channel in certain cells in the body, called TRPM3, was the cause of ME.
Its the first time these channels have ever been found to be faulty , and weve reproduced that four separate times, Professor Marshall-Gradisnik said.
Professors Sonya Marshall-Gradisnik and Don Staines from Griffith Universitys Menzies Health Institute.Credit:Griffith University
Why Is Food Important
A balanced diet is the main source of energy that is much needed to a person who is already feeling weak and tired. Eating small frequent meals was found to assist CFS patients as it fuels them up throughout the day without over-indulging them.
The truth is eating larger amounts can tire anyone sick or healthy because blood get directed away from the brain and limbs but to your stomach and intestines.
=> Have a look on our list of good foods to help you reduce fatigue !
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Cells From Patients With Fatigue Show Significantly Lower Nad+/nadh Ratio Levels
Oxaloacetate increases the NAD+/NADH ratio in animal models which would push this ratio in ME/CFS patients towards normalization. When oxaloacetate enters the cell, it can react to the metabolite malate in the cytoplasm via the action of the ubiquitous enzyme malate dehydrogenase. As part of this reaction, NADH is turned into NAD+, boosting the NAD+/NADH ratio. Krebs measured the change in the NAD+/NADH ratio with supplemental oxaloacetate as a 900% increase within 2 min .
Diseases Affecting Women Receive Less Focus And Funding
Perhaps one of the reasons for this lack of focus and funding is because most ME patients are women. Diseases predominantly affecting women receive significantly less research funding. This means women and gender diverse people’s bodies are still poorly understood in medicine.
Shockingly, female animals and humans were excluded from medical testing until very recently. Women have been prescribed drugs for decades without them having been tested on female bodies.
This lack of knowledge is compounded by the incentive for doctors to provide short consults, limiting the potential for women’s complex illnesses to be properly treated. Together, these factors result in doctors too often distrusting women and gender diverse people’s accounts of their own bodies.
Millions of people globally, up to 80 per cent of them women, present to doctors with the debilitating symptoms of ME. Some doctors tell us to rest or lose weight or see a psychologist. An infectious diseases specialist smiled at me indulgently and suggested I was “just tired” because of my work as a lawyer. One senior immunologist said I would “probably” get better because I was not obese and had a positive attitude there was “no need” for a further appointment.
Both were wrong because ME is a complex neuro-immune disease. I haven’t worked as a lawyer since 2014 and though my optimism has survived, so too has my disease.
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Can This Condition Be Cured
Not everyone makes full recovery but the majority of sufferers do improve with time. Moreover, symptoms of chronic fatigue syndrome fluctuate between mild to severe periodically. Reviews reports that younger people have higher and better chances of complete healing than adults. It means if treatment is done early enough, children can be cured and thus have a chance of leading a normal life.
Chronic Fatigue: It Is Time To Take Its Treatment More Seriously
Mclean/Shutterstock.com
One in four consultations in primary care involve fatigue its the most common reason why people go to see their GP, says Julia Newton, a consultant physician with an interest in fatigue at Newcastle upon Tyne Hospitals NHS Foundation Trust.
At least 250,000 people in the UK live with myalgic encephalomyelitis/chronic fatigue syndrome , a long-term neurological disease with a wide range of symptoms, including debilitating pain, fatigue and crashes after activity known as post-exertional malaise. And self-reported data indicate that 50% of people with chronic conditions such as rheumatoid arthritis, cancer, Parkinsons disease, or multiple sclerosis struggle with tiredness. Despite that, theres very little research, points out Newton.
Lack of funding has left fatigue science decades behind the scientific understanding of other chronic symptoms, such as pain.
In part, this is owing to the heterogeneity of how fatigue is experienced. On top of presenting across multiple conditions, it can be emotional, physical, cognitive or motivational in nature, and varies from person to person even from day-to-day for the same patient . This diversity means conducting research can be a tricky and unattractive investment.
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Setting And Patient Inclusion
Since 2011 patients with a likely diagnosis of ME/CFS have been referred to the Department of Oncology and Medical Physics, Haukeland University Hospital , for possible inclusion in clinical trials. Based on available information and proximity to the treating hospital, patients previously included in trials with rituximab and newly referred patients were invited to receive information about the trial. Following signed informed consent, the patients were screened for eligibility.
Inclusion criteria were: a diagnosis of ME/CFS according to the Canadian criteria age 1866 years disease duration more than 2 years and disease severity mild-to-moderate, moderate, moderate-to-severe, or severe. Patients with either mild or very severe disease were not included. The exclusion criteria and pre-treatment evaluation are detailed in the trial protocol .
Recruitment lasted from March 2015 until December 2015. All 40 patients were included at the Department of Oncology and Medical Physics, HUH. Seven patients had parts of their treatment and follow-up at the Department of Oncology, Oslo University Hospital .
Follow-up was originally completed in August 2017, with assessments for prolonged follow-up performed in January 2018 and April 2019.
Dietary Modification For Chronic Fatigue Syndrome
Although diet alone cannot cure chronic fatigue syndrome, eating certain foods are known to worsen or ease the symptoms of the condition. Patients with CFS are prone to weight problems. Due to physical inactivity caused by tiredness and muscle pain these people may gain weight
Commonly, chronic fatigue syndrome patients may feel they need to eat more in order to gain more strength to control the tiredness. Some medication can also increase peoples appetite. All these factors contribute to weight gain which is not a desired outcome as it might lead to other diseases.
However, some people may lose weight as a result of appetite loss, nauseated feeling, inability to buy or cook food. Moreover, irritable bowel symptoms like diarrhea, constipation, abdominal pain can further contribute to weight loss.
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