Kandings Interneuron theory

[Frunobulax]

I came across this in another forum. Personally the theory did not convince me because it's almost diametrally opposite to my own theories, however I also can't put my finger on the reason why. I have to admit that I read it fully, but my knowledge about brain biology are not sufficient to understand it all.

Has anyone read this? Comments?

https://medium.com/@RudgerKanding/e...-chronic-fatigue-syndrome-part-1-ff0b5bae9d14

 

[ScottTriGuy]

Perused it - in spite of his protestations, it is another variation of in your head / past trauma memories:

"...What spectrum of symptoms will be provoked in this way? This will be individually completely different. Because that depends on the kinds of aversive memories the affected person carries..."

 

[percyval577]

from the article

Please note: Contrary to a possible first impression, the article does not develop a psychological, but a purely physiological disease mechanism.

I havn´t digged in any details of the article, but this I think to be a very important approach.

Strategically:
Because our concrete symptoms are diverse and unspecific it is not all too stupid to assume a malfunction of nerves. This would also be the common between "physical" symptoms (including downstream effects on the non-brain body) and "mental" symptoms; in fact they both may be only different expression of the same malfunction.

Then the idea comes up - against the first impression that the illness is triggered physiologically: "Ah yes, it´s the patients, their mind is somehow screwed up." and blaming patients. But note, who says "mind" says "cortex", so

THIS IS BY NO MEANS a necessary conclusion, nor is it even plauzible. INSTEAD one should stick to the development of the disease from physiological impacts, and ask in which areas of the brain this illness might be generated.

Here I personally I probabaly differ to the article, I think it must be the mechanism of allover brain homeostasis, so to interpret, the basal ganglia and thalamus.

 

[percyval577]

Perused it - in spite of his protestations, it is another variation of in your head / past trauma memories:

"...What spectrum of symptoms will be provoked in this way? This will be individually completely different. Because that depends on the kinds of aversive memories the affected person carries..."

This sentence is absolutely not necessary for any nerve interpretation. Sad, that it is to be found again. Skip "averse" and the sentence would be ok enough (though by far not the whole possible story).

Any normal minding could translate completely exaggerated into "feelings and abilities" (now indeed "symptoms"). I guess nobody wants to blame normal mindings.


A special case of feelings and abilities is ill feeling and acting in illness. It is a lack of logical thinking to skip the possibility that a presumed mechanism of feeling ill is ill - in the nervous system. Or in general, in a "translation mechanism".

In special, the biopsycholoical model is guilty not to see a bio-psychological mechanism, which obviously must be a physiological entity, WHICH COULD BE PYSCHOLOGICAL ILL.

If everybody shies away, we might miss the solution.

 

[Frunobulax]

Perused it - in spite of his protestations, it is another variation of in your head / past trauma memories:

"...What spectrum of symptoms will be provoked in this way? This will be individually completely different. Because that depends on the kinds of aversive memories the affected person carries..."

I don't think that's true. If you take LSD or any other psychotropic drug, you will experience a range of, well, sensations, that are entirely made up from your own mind. Yet the reason is clearly physiological.

In fact, I think it's likely that psychiatric disorders are a lot more rooted in physical reasons than psychiatrists think. If you compare our brain to a computer, depression is not a bug in the program (the software) but a hardware issue. And our brain (the software) is smart enough to adapt itself to a faulty equipment, but may show a few glitches. We can often fix severe depressions with diet and supplements, more efficient than years of psychotherapy. How does that fit the theory that our software is buggy? Psychatrists just look at one side of the puzzle. They try to tweak the software (enable our brain to work around faulty hardware even better) instead of fixing the hardware. They never look for a physical cause for an illness. One reason why I strongly dislike psychiatrists.

I'm not convinced of his idea for quite another reason. I believe that ME/CFS is a modern disease, because we have no old records of mysteric fatigues beyond 100 years. There may have been a few isolated cases, sure, but I don't think it had a high prevalence. A disease like diabetes was very rare too 150 years ago (maybe 1 in 1000), rarer than ME/CFS today, yet it was well known and described. So whatever causes ME/CFS, either it's a new virus/pathogen (like AIDS) or the western environment (diet, toxins) seems to cause it or make it a few orders of magnitude more likely, or both. I don't see where that fits into his theory.

Another reason is that his theory needs to explain how the historical outbreaks happened. He says a person gets ill if the sum of averse memories pass a threshold. But since we had outbreaks that followed the pattern of an infectious disease, there has to be an external trigger. Most outbreaks happened to people after vaccinations (AFAIK), would a weakened immune system be enough to "push people over the cliff"?

I still find it intriguing to think about unconventional ideas, and he may be on to something. Maybe he's on track why we have these highly individual symptoms, but has the wrong trigger. Who knows?

 

[emdhypothesis]

Thanks to frunobulax for posting my hypothesis herd, I didn’t know the forum. And thanks to all for the comments, they are invaluable for me!

I didn’t focus on CFS when I developed the hypothesis so, I overlooked some sources of misunderstanding.

To avoid these misunderstandings, I changed at crucial places „aversive memories“ into „aversive memories, or immune system memories in the case of CFS“.

E.g., "...What spectrum of symptoms will be provoked in this way? This will be individually completely different. Because that depends on the kinds of aversive memories, or, in the special case of CFS, on the immune system memories, the affected person carries..."

And I’ll soon write a small comment on how the hypothesis fits with the historical outbreaks.

 

[emdhypothesis]

Hello, I extended my hypothesis with a brief explanation of the historic outbreaks of CFS, here again the whole CFS part of my hypothesis:

CFS is caused in a very unusual way by the overactivity of specific, brain-internal immune memories that are formed during a viral infection. In short: the overactivity of these memories reinstantiates the brain's internal cytokine profile of the original infection, and thus the original feeling of illness, the so-called sickness behavior (14). Even though this is a brain-internal process, it has a paralyzing effect on the body.

A detailed explanation, supported by many scientific studies, can be found here (4) in chapter 3.4. The term "e/x balance" used there refers to the collection of aversive memories and extinction memories present in an individual.

Triggers of CFS include all factors that affect the function of the extinction memory and thus activate immune memories and the associated sickness behaviour.

In addition, it is conceivable that special molecular properties of certain bacterial or viral infections may have an unusually strong detrimental effect on the extinction memory. An infection with such properties could therefore also activate old immune memories or prevent the correct extinction of the immune memory formed during the ongoing infection. In both cases, the infection would trigger CFS in this way. This would explain the epidemic-like outbreaks of CFS.

In this context, it is highly interesting to note that CFS outbreaks frequently occurred in healthcare workers. The occupational, permanently high emotional stress in this group of persons tends to lead to an increased number of aversive memories, which results in increased activity and thus also vulnerability of the extinction memory. It is also known that chronic emotional stress leads to chronic, low-grade inflammatory processes (see e.g. PMID 24608036). These can also attack the extinction memory. At the same time, healthcare workers are exposed to an increased germ load. The resulting clinical and subclinical infections further intensify chronic low-grade inflammatory processes and also lead to increased formation of immune memories.

In summary, it can be concluded from these considerations that the probability of a vulnerable extinction memory, as well as the presence of immune memories that can trigger CFS, is significantly increased in healthcare workers. The presented hypothesis explains therefore the epidemic outbreaks of CFS, as well as the frequent occurrence of these outbreaks in healthcare workers.

 

[percyval577]

CFS is caused in a very unusual way by the overactivity of specific, brain-internal immune memories that are formed during a viral infection. In short: the overactivity of these memories reinstantiates the brain's internal cytokine profile of the original infection, and thus the original feeling of illness, the so-called sickness behavior (14). Even though this is a brain-internal process, it has a paralyzing effect on the body.
...
Triggers of CFS include all factors that affect the function of the extinction memory and thus activate immune memories and the associated sickness behaviour.

This then is the core of your rather very interesting theory, right?

In addition, it is conceivable that special molecular properties of certain bacterial or viral infections may have an unusually strong detrimental effect on the extinction memory. An infection with such properties could therefore also activate old immune memories or prevent the correct extinction of the immune memory formed during the ongoing infection. In both cases, the infection would trigger CFS in this way. This would explain the epidemic-like outbreaks of CFS.

You also postulate a misgauging?

In this context, it is highly interesting to note that CFS outbreaks frequently occurred in healthcare workers. The occupational, permanently high emotional stress in this group of persons tends to lead to an increased number of aversive memories, which results in increased activity and thus also vulnerability of the extinction memory.

Although I don´t want to deny that stress can be either one causal factor - or can occur upon a causal factor - , I don´t think that stress is a major player.

In fact, stress up to a certain level, and of a certain quality, may be considered to be a natural and healthy property in human acting and doing. Back in the mid of the last century, I think, the people have been rather enthusiastic about new possibilities of modern live, especially in America. Maybe it´s enthusiasm that means a vulnerability to triggers for the illness?

 

[JES]

In summary, it can be concluded from these considerations that the probability of a vulnerable extinction memory, as well as the presence of immune memories that can trigger CFS, is significantly increased in healthcare workers. The presented hypothesis explains therefore the epidemic outbreaks of CFS, as well as the frequent occurrence of these outbreaks in healthcare workers.

It may be an interesting hypothesis, but I don't really see how the presence of past outbreaks would support it. According to Occam's razor, the simplest hypothesis and the one that requires least assumptions is most likely the correct one. Healthcare workers, as you correctly pointed out, are much more exposed to various pathogens and an increased germ load than the average person. Knowing that ME/CFS is most often triggered by an infection and the central role of infections in this disease, you don't need to add any extra assumptions about extinction memory to reach the conclusion that hospital workers may be more vulnerable to this disease. Moreover, as we know now, ME/CFS outbreaks have mysteriously almost completely stopped since the early 90's, so it might not be very useful to attempt to explain modern ME/CFS with outbreaks to begin with.

 

[lagarto]

'm not convinced of his idea for quite another reason. I believe that ME/CFS is a modern disease, because we have no old records of mysteric fatigues beyond 100 years. There may have been a few isolated cases, sure, but I don't think it had a high prevalence.

I don't think that's right - we have quite a lot of stories about this kind of thing, but the language used was very different in different periods of time. Wording that might include other diseases as well, such as MS. To my frustration, none of the examples of the language used I can think of are in English, but maybe some pop up later.

That said, I think the prevalence is likely to have increased as well.