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Did anything stress you out before you got me/Cfs?

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1,478
Just some food for thought - look at death rates throughout history. Not just tens of thousands of years ago, but basically up until penicilin and modern medicine. Everyone you love constantly dying around you seems pretty stressful to me. (I always think back to an old woman in my grandmother's village who lost 8 children and her husband to Spanish flu)

Maybe I'm biased because I had wonderful childhood and I accidentally happened to be in the least stressful period of my life when I came down with ME/CFS.
I don't think it has to be necessarily stressful, just that the hormones involved in the brains response to dealing with flight or fight are somehow linked to onset (along with a great many other things) This isn't something that you necessarily are aware of since most of this is going on in the background without us knowing it. It's the frequency and duration that we tap into that adrenal response that's been postulated not the severity of the event. More like a slowly dripping tap as you get through life (most of the time enjoying it). Of course you still come back to why are some people fine and others not? which is the big question.
 

Neunistiva

Senior Member
Messages
442
I don't think it has to be necessarily stressful, just that the hormones involved in the brains response to dealing with flight or fight are somehow linked to onset (along with a great many other things) This isn't something that you necessarily are aware of since most of this is going on in the background without us knowing it. It's the frequency and duration that we tap into that adrenal response that's been postulated not the severity of the event. More like a slowly dripping tap as you get through life (most of the time enjoying it). Of course you still come back to why are some people fine and others not? which is the big question.

This would only be meaningful if people with ME/CFS are statistically more subject to the flight of fight response than general population. Otherwise, this would be like saying having intestines is linked with Celiac disease. Flight or fight response is as natural part of human body as intestines are.

Also, it pays to keep in mind that stress and flight or fight response have historically very very often been linked with illnesses that science hasn't yet found the cause of. Once the real cause is found stress is forgotten.
 
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1,478
This would only be meaningful if people with ME/CFS are statistically more subject to the flight of fight response than general population. Otherwise, this would be like saying having intestines is linked with Celiac disease. Flight or fight response is as natural part of human body as intestines are.

Also, it pays to keep in mind that stress and flight or fight response have historically very very often been linked with illnesses that science hasn't yet found the cause of. Once the real cause is found stress is forgotten.
Hmm not sure how that argument works, since it's fairly obvious that we are different to the main population. Otherwise everyone would have CFS? Perhaps you could postulate an alternative hypothesis as to why lots of people report sustained stress before their onset?
 

Neunistiva

Senior Member
Messages
442
Hmm not sure how that argument works, since it's fairly obvious that we are different to the main population.

Maybe we are talking past each other here? Or is it not clear that something else, unrelated to stress, could be what makes us different?

Perhaps you could postulate an alternative hypothesis as to why lots of people report sustained stress before their onset?

Because people are generally under sustained stess, it's a normal side-effect of life, and we are desperately looking for patterns to explain how we got sick.

That's why a person who was under stress says it's probably related to stress, and I who was not say it's probably not related to stress.

Keep in mind, I am not claiming prolonged stress can't be a trigger. I am just saying until we have a high quality trial comparing stress levels of people who didn't develop ME/CFS to those who did, we have no reason to think there is a link.

Ask healthy people if they are constantly under stress and most will say yes.
 

JES

Senior Member
Messages
1,320
Prolonged/constant stress is already present in so many activities that we should probably have seen some correlation by now if it were a real trigger for CFS/ME.

For example, imagine being a solider fighting a war, that must be one of the worst stresses imaginable, and not only mental, your body will go through massive efforts as well. Apart from the famous "Gulf War Syndrome", I have not read anything about for example soldiers fighting in the Iraq War getting CFS/ME. What I have read a lot about is the mental problems many experience after getting released and back home (there is even the famous book/movie "American Sniper" that describes these problems). But there seems to be no buzz around war veterans developing CFS/ME.

Oh well, CFS/ME is not as much in the news anyway as mental health, but if war veterans suddenly started becoming bed-bound, I guess we would hear more about it, especially as these people are so highly regarded in society.
 
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1,478
I think there is

Ray et al. (1998) found that a portion of participants attributed their illness development to their immune system “breaking down.” A subset (36%) of participants in the current study also endorsed an immune component to their illness cause. These individuals typically described a series of infections (one individual described infections in combination with a physical trauma) that negatively impacted the immune system over time. These findings are consistent with an immune component theory posed by Hyde et al. (2007) who asserts that ME often follows multiple, minor infections in individuals with susceptible immune systems or immune systems that are weakened by severe stressors (e.g. contact with infectious persons, exhaustion, trauma, immunizations, epidemic disease, travel and exposure to virulent agents). Additionally, prior research has evidenced immune dysfunction and damage to the CNS in individuals with CFS (Broderick et al., 2010).


I'm not talking about psycobabble here I'm talking about our endocrine system and how it relates to our immunological response and can make us vulnerable if indeed we have that vulnerability to start with.

There is unlikely to be one trigger. So yes stress is not a trigger on its own. Equally a virus on its own is not a trigger. More likely it is a combination of things, but it seems to involve the immune system at some point.