alex3619
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Agreed. It would be nice to continue the debate at another time and in another thread though.But I think we are digressing from the matter in hand.
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Agreed. It would be nice to continue the debate at another time and in another thread though.But I think we are digressing from the matter in hand.
Someone has written out a transcript of Dr Mark Edward's presentation https://docs.google.com/document/d/1f3FsqRgzLiah_mbMi1j7nDoUih5auUf8VJv03kjnsUQ/mobilebasic
It looks brilliant to me. [...] I would double the £600,000 personally.
My impression was that we're still at a difficult transition point in terms of ME/CFS research in the UK and that I'd like to have seen more of the sort of biomedical scientists who attend the IiME meetings attending this conference and helping to boost the biomedical team and crowd the BPS nonsense out.
What's your overall take, @Jonathan Edwards?
I actually think we have broken through the glass ceiling this week. The scientists who were not in Newcastle were busy getting collaborations going in London - including Harrison from that team and Fluge in two places at once together with the big immunology and neuroimaging guns. There may be another bit of news coming shortly which will take us another step forward on both the IiME and the Holgate agenda but we need to wait a little while.
The existence of two different forums with apparently different agendas (IiME, CMRC) may on the surface look like a problem but I would see it a bit more like Apple and Microsoft (remember the adverts?). A bit of competition can help. And the important people have a foot in both camps.
And I rather suspect that nobody said 'biopsychosocial' at either meeting - am I right?
Never struck me as a problem, more people focussed on good research is always good in my book. Though I guess it does makes it a bit tricky when they meet on the same day!The existence of two different forums with apparently different agendas (IiME, CMRC) may on the surface look like a problem but I would see it a bit more like Apple and Microsoft (remember the adverts?). A bit of competition can help. And the important people have a foot in both camps.
Never struck me as a problem, more people focussed on good research is always good in my book. Though I guess it does makes it a bit tricky when they meet on the same day!
Many thanks and to Russell in particular.
It is all about inflammatory and neural pathways and specifically about PEM so all that stuff about Oxford criteria can go in the bin. .
Now we know what we are talking about
The Oxford criteria does not require PEM so it would be impossible for it to be about PEM if it was used.
That was my point!
Some highlights:Transcript of Mark Edwards' talk, courtesy of Russell Fleming (@Firestormmer on twitter)
https://docs.google.com/document/d/1f3FsqRgzLiah_mbMi1j7nDoUih5auUf8VJv03kjnsUQ/edit
So it looks like the mecfs project is part of a bigger whole (on functional syndromes); not sure if the £600k is for the whole thing, or just the mecfs element, but at 20 controls/20 subjects x 2 tests, £600k seems too much for the ME/CFS project alone.a project which is part of a MRC grant which is based on that idea about thinking about mechanism first of all.
This is a collaborative project.., there are a number of people involved in this sphere, particularly Neil Harrison who may have spoken at one of these events before [he did in 2014 – see my twitter feed for details]. Neil is a neuropsychiatrist working for the University of Sussex and has a particular interest in the interaction between the immune system and the brain.
Neil Harrison: Interferon alpha rapidly changes brain microstructure
This was a fascinating presentation of early results from a study of brain fMRI changes after giving alpha interferon to people with hepatitis C. Alpha interferon produces fatigue in a high proportion of people treated, within 4 hours. Dr Harrison admitted that he did not yet have formal controls but he had picked up a very interesting finding. On an analysis called qMT patients developed hot spots over the basal ganglia and particularly on the left hand side 4 hours after treatment. qMT assesses the extent to which protons (hydrogen atoms) are present in the randomly behaving form present in water and how much in a more regularised form in larger molecules. It is not clear what the changes he found would mean biochemically but it is interesting that other researchers have found changes on the left side in basal ganglia in a related experiment using a different type of analysis. What I like about this is that it does not seem to be just ‘cytokines causing inflammation’ but something much more specific.
This is the symptom we were thinking about when we were designing this project – post-exertional malaise. We can’t say post-exertional fatigue because it is something more than that. It is a key symptom in CFS/ME and it comes with a range of different phenomena – physical phenomena – relating to pain, to weakness, to fatigue and also cognitive phenomena like cognitive slowing, fogginess etc. And there is this interesting phenomenon that at least for some people it has this slightly delayed onset; so somebody might have a period of exertion one day and then the next day all of this hits in a very big way.
So it is a key symptom, essentially a key mechanism that is going on. Thinking about that symptom, are there any models out there from what we know about how the brain works in different conditions that might allow a little more information about that.
Well there is a key model and that’s that this range of symptoms I am talking about – this post-exertional malaise – is similar to something which is usually called a ‘sickness response’.
Just to be clear, we are talking about normal, 'healthy' responses in healthy people above, no patients involved in that work.this insula being particular important in processing this information it is getting and generating the symptoms that people experience.
And this is something called the interoceptive network – the network of brain structures which lets us take information from the body and lets us interpret that saying what’s going on in our own body.
You seem to think that having the study focus on PEM will prevent them from using Oxford. But I think you are grossly underestimating the ridiculous and inappropriate things which psychosomatic researchers will doThat was my point!
The bottom line is that Descartes's idea of a soul is very much part of physics and he intended it to be. Now that might seem to get us back to mind = brain. But the reason why Descartes put the soul in the pineal is that he understood a basic principle of physics that modern neuroscience tries to ignore - the law of locality. In simple terms a conscious thought or experience, to be a physical event, must be in a single place. All this stuff about emergence from neural networks has to be rubbish. A sentient soul cannot be the entire brain, or even a lobe or gyrus or network. In this sense the mind must be something quite different from the brain - something much more local. Crucially, as both Descartes and Leibniz understood it cannot be an aggregate; it must be a genuinely single unit.
In simple terms a conscious thought or experience, to be a physical event, must be in a single place. All this stuff about emergence from neural networks has to be rubbish. A sentient soul cannot be the entire brain, or even a lobe or gyrus or network. In this sense the mind must be something quite different from the brain - something much more local. Crucially, as both Descartes and Leibniz understood it cannot be an aggregate; it must be a genuinely single unit.
Some highlights:
They plan to look at the brain - focusing on the insula - comparing mefcs patients......
They are taking blood samples so they can measure immune changes alongside changes in the brain.
Wow!Dr Fluge (even though he was invisible)
You seem to think that having the study focus on PEM will prevent them from using Oxford. But I think you are grossly underestimating the ridiculous and inappropriate things which psychosomatic researchers will do
In any event, the other Edwards isn't an ME specialist, which means he probably has no idea what PEM is. It could end up being interpreted in a dozen different ways.