Comment by Malcx | Hacker News Reader

Comment by Malcx | Hacker News Reader

Parent Full thread

Interesting thoughts and it's always good to hear from those who've recovered, hopefully yours was full?

I'm always open to differing views, so would be interested in any recent papers pointing to a psychosomatic cause, especially as this seems to be an area active research is moving away from.

I completely agree the mind/body need to be treated more as a single entity, but the researchers and clinicians I've been engaged with are most certainly looking at this in a non Cartesian way. Nb these are not general practice doctors.

Again, I'm comp sci rather than medical, so my experiences are anecdotal but a good many of the CFS patients I've known have not been under chronic stress with the often exception of CFS seemingly being triggered by a viral infection such as glandular fever. I can't comment on whether cortisol levels remain high.

Fundamentally there is so much we don't understand about what may in fact be a group of illnesses, hence why people's personal stories seem to fall into two or three conflicting camps.

We need more data to go on, which is why I've a side project looking to address this which will hopefully lead to more areas of research.

Yes, my recovery was full. I haven't had any symptoms in about 15 years, so I think that is a fair assumption to make.

Studies do show that the majority of CFS patients report more stressful life events preceding their illness than controls (e.g. Salit 1997, Hatcher et al. 2003, Theorell et al. 1999). Also, from speaking to patients, you do very often find that they lived stressful lives prior to developing CFS.

Also bear in mind that it may be burnout more than stress that is important in triggering the illness, and it appears to be possible to have burnout even in the absence of stress (see for example Pruessner et al., 1999).

Infections also activate the HPA axis in a similar way to psychogolical stress, and it may be a combination of stress and infection that causes CFS. (Some studies show that gulf war syndrome is more likely if vaccinations occur during the stress of combat). Alternatively the viral infection at onset might simply be due to suppression of the immune system due to stress.

If you're interested, here is my theory of CFS:

https://peerj.com/preprints/860/

Feel free to email me or leave a comment there if you have any comments. If you're interested in this area, I'd recommend reading the full-text of the studies in my references -- let me know if you want the full-text of any of them. Like you I'm compsci rather than medical, but IMO a lot of the medical people aren't really doing a good job at figuring out this illness.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com