***Thanks for posting these abstracts. I think that these papers are some of the more interesting studies that have been done in ME/CFS, and I think that they do provide some clues as to what is going on, but they are all looking at downstream effects in the pathophysiology. Until people start asking about earlier events in the cause and effect tree, they will continue to be describing effects rather than causes, and the treatments that result will not be getting at the root of this disorder.
***Sorry for the rant, but I presented this hypothesis to the research community at the IACFS/ME conference over four years ago, and unfortunately, they continue to quibble over whether it is psychological or neurological or immunological or endocrinological, or rheumatological, or infectious, or toxicological, or mitochondrial, or genomic or gastroenterological, or allergic, or ?, and the fact (in my opinion) is that it affects all these specialties, but its origin is not in any of them.
***If you've read this far, thank you for your indulgence!-)
***Best regards,
***Rich
Thanks for your reply, Rich. I thought those studies were very interesting, too. They all described a pathology, but as far as I could see from the abstracts, only one (Pietrangelo) attempted to consider a cause, and it was an alteration in gene expression, which was only a proximal cause. I wondered if the methylation block could produce that alteration in gene expression, and it sounds like you're saying yes, it could.
What's frustrating to me is that, regardless of whether we agree on an ultimate cause, we have all these replicated pathologies--just like in a lot of well-accepted diseases--yet it's still considered to have unexplained symptoms and be controversial whether it's a physiological disease or not (even whether it's a physiological disease in a subset of broadly-defined CFS).
I also agree that this is a cellular disease, and that cellular disease deserves a new category because it spans everything.