alex3619
Senior Member
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- 13,810
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- Logan, Queensland, Australia
Well, I feel ancient a lot of the time.He should have omitted "ancient."
"Ancient" refers to the evolutionary development. The brain stem is evolved from simpler brain stems in just about every vertebrate going back as far as we can trace. Its the most basic part of the brain. Its also where we keep finding problems in ME and CFS .... either directly in MRI scans, for example, or indirectly in circadian disruption. Sleep, for example, was recently identified to have its circadian pattern regulated not just by the SCN in the hypothalamus, but also another region in the brain stem, a second circadian center.
My possible trigger was measles encephalitis. I wonder if they are thinking along the lines that some cells may be damaged in the brain stem and that this causes improper signalling.
CFS and ME spontaneous remissions can be very sudden ... minutes to an hour; they can also last only hours. So from disabled to normal to disabled within a day. That sounds like a dynamic problem to me, possibly in regulation. Once the dynamics are understood, at least for a subset, I expect we will be able to target therapies against specific issues.