Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Scientists Edge Closer To Lab Test For Chronic Fatigue Syndrome

npr.org

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

131–140 of 181 posts

Re: Scientists Edge Closer To Lab Test For Chronic Fatigue Syndrome

#131

Post by Smaug123 »

inieves wrote: post #109

CFS is most likely "Candidasis". An overgrowth of candida bacteria/yeast in the gut. This is very well known, and easily and cost effectively treatable. Consistent overconsumption of processed sugars leads to candida overgrowth. The body addresses this naturally through inflamation. Prolonged inflamation yields depression symptoms, and a host of other things. Google: candida You can recover from this mostly in one ni…

The trouble with this kind of comment is that I can find scores of people who say that CFS (and fibromyalgia) is most likely a misdiagnosed hypothyroidism, treatable with standard T3/T4. Lots of people say "it's obviously treatable in " for some value of , and that makes them all less credible.

Re: Scientists Edge Closer To Lab Test For Chronic Fatigue Syndrome

#132

Post by JPLeRouzic »

joools wrote: post #50
jdietrich wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's also worth noting that there is no clear causal relationship. There is a strong and well-established association between depression and inflammatory biomarkers, but we have very little idea of whether depression increases the risk of inflammatory illness or vice-versa. http://www.mdedge.com/currentpsychiatry/article/76288/depres...

The research I'm familiar with (and teach) suggests you see associations prospectively in both directions, but no clear evidence of causality (although I've grown skeptical of causality as a concept). This PNAS paper is nice to see, although as some are pointing out, there's a bit of p-hacking probably going on. My sense is that certain research topics are kind of ground zero in this misled, outdated mind-body war. S…

I am at the half of this long thread, comments are incredibly good and interesting --even for HN-- but yours seems to me outstanding. Thanks for taking the time to write it.

Re: Scientists Edge Closer To Lab Test For Chronic Fatigue Syndrome

#133

Post by hiram112 »

propman wrote: post #53
bogidon wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Rarely it is psychological "Medically unexplained physical symptoms (MUPS) are physical symptoms for which no relevant organic pathology can be found. MUPS are very common, comprising up to half of all consultations in primary care and up to one third of those in hospital outpatient clinics.1 Some studies indicate higher prevalence; a landmark study of medical outpatients in North America with new complaints of com…

The ailments you describe though can certainly be debilitating but require no underlying diagnosis. Me and my mother have horrible migraines, no one knows why but it doesn't matter because I was prescribed a medicine, didn't work. I was prescribed a second one and it worked and it is frustrating and it sucks but quality of life is the same. For all those ailments, we can treat stomach aches, dizziness, headaches. But…

> Doctor classifies it under a broad diagnosis requiring little tests and you're screwed for life.

I don't understand. Can you clarify what you're saying?

Re: Scientists Edge Closer To Lab Test For Chronic Fatigue Syndrome

#134

Post by tomcam »

gozur88 wrote: post #40
tomcam wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

MD's are by and large incredibly non-curious about hard-to-diagnose chronic conditions

Because as a society we can't spend ten million dollars on every patient with a hard-to-diagnose chronic condition that may just be stress. It just isn't practical.

How did you get there from my comment?

Re: Scientists Edge Closer To Lab Test For Chronic Fatigue Syndrome

#135

Post by devnonymous »

propman wrote: post #9

If someone comes to you with a whole lot of pain and loss of function, ignoring it and thinking it's just in their head/they just need to toughen up and get over it because nothing showed up in thier blood reports is something that is almost ubiquitous in the medical field today. I have a connective tissue disorder that was ignored for years because nothing showed up in my blood report and I looked healthy. There is…

I find it amusing that one can so easily make an analogy with what you just described and the debugging of heisenbugs. How often do we as computer practitioners dismiss off user pains as just works for me and they are not-using-the-system-correctly?

Re: Scientists Edge Closer To Lab Test For Chronic Fatigue Syndrome

#136

Post by Kudos »

inieves wrote: post #109

CFS is most likely "Candidasis". An overgrowth of candida bacteria/yeast in the gut. This is very well known, and easily and cost effectively treatable. Consistent overconsumption of processed sugars leads to candida overgrowth. The body addresses this naturally through inflamation. Prolonged inflamation yields depression symptoms, and a host of other things. Google: candida You can recover from this mostly in one ni…

FWIW, this did not work for me.

Re: Scientists Edge Closer To Lab Test For Chronic Fatigue Syndrome

#137

Post by inopinatus »

sctb wrote: post #126
inopinatus wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You said everything of that sort. If that was not your intent, then perhaps in future you might say what you mean, rather than defending the vendors of false hope and perpetuating the extremely harmful myth that one can treat oneself. As in this: > patients themselves are often better informed than general MDs No, that is a gross overgeneralisation and not true of any condition. A few patients may have slightly bette…

Would you please stop being so personally rude and thorny? Discussions are always of higher quality when we aren't and quality is what we're here for.

Yes, sorry, that was hyperbolic of me.

Re: Scientists Edge Closer To Lab Test For Chronic Fatigue Syndrome

#138

Post by maga »

mudil wrote: post #17

I am an MD, born in Russia, but did medical school here in the United States. All the same, people constantly ask about the Russian medicine, and so I was recently asked if we have fibromyalgia in Russia. My answer was that I don't know about fibromyalgia. But what I know is that half of the psychotropic drugs that people are prescribed in this country we only give to political prisoners in Russia.

On the other side, every other drug effecting brain in the slightest is a prescription drug due to being abused by addicts. Ranging from a popular nootropic Pirocetam to Tropicamide. I'm not sure what feats of ingenuity Russian drug addicts perform to get hooked on them, but I had hard time getting Tropicamide for my eyes when I was in Russia. Local ophthalmologist told me to do a ten day course of Tropicamide, but couldn't give me a prescription because I'm not a local, and the pharmacies couldn't sell me this thing without an official prescription.

Re: Scientists Edge Closer To Lab Test For Chronic Fatigue Syndrome

#139

Post by hycaria »

tomcam wrote: post #24
propman wrote: post #9

If someone comes to you with a whole lot of pain and loss of function, ignoring it and thinking it's just in their head/they just need to toughen up and get over it because nothing showed up in thier blood reports is something that is almost ubiquitous in the medical field today. I have a connective tissue disorder that was ignored for years because nothing showed up in my blood report and I looked healthy. There is…

MD's are by and large incredibly non-curious about hard-to-diagnose chronic conditions

So are programmers by and large incredibly non-curious about learning completely new stuff they will probably not even use so much, and for which they could make solutions with the tools they have.

It's a job like any other. Some people don't want to go the extra mile because they have other priorities in life.

Re: Scientists Edge Closer To Lab Test For Chronic Fatigue Syndrome

#140

Post by amelius »

kens wrote: post #106
Gibbon1 wrote: post #96

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The thing that currently spazs me out is the Simpson Paradox (Yule–Simpson effect) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Simpson%27s_paradox In short, if your population has two (or more) diseases with similar enough symptoms that they are grouped together, statistical analysis can and does totally fail. And your experiment will produce garbage. So what if Chronic Fatigue Syndrome is really caused by a couple of different th…

That's a very good point. The paper suggests that "severity may be a key variable for subgrouping ME/CFS." So it's possible that there are three different ME/CFS diseases that can be distinguished by cytokine levels. Hopefully once these are separated, statistical analysis will succeed and medical progress would follow. In the bigger picture, you have to wonder how many things that we currently categorize as one dise…

The opposite may also occur. For example, autism may be CFS, but confined to a specific part of the brain. (This is just an example, not necessarily true of course).
Post reply on HN