Altitude sickness sounds exactly like ME/CFS

[borko2100]

From wikipedia:

Symptoms include headache, fatigue, stomach illness, dizziness, and sleep disturbance.[8] Exertion aggravates the symptoms.

This describes my illness almost perfeclty haha. You might just as well call it 'Chronic altitude sickness syndrome'

I guess we do have some sort of problem utilizing oxygen. There's many oxygen related theories, I guess one of them could be true.

 

[percyval577]

Wiki says:

Mild cases may be helped by ibuprofen, acetazolamide, or dexamethasone.[2]

Ibu can help me too, though I don´t trust it.

I guess the lack of oxygen might affect what the core of mecfs is.

 

[Wishful]

I think the exertion part of altitude sickness is referring to an increased need for oxygen, which isn't available. That's different from PEM, which might take 24 hrs or more before showing an increase in symptoms.

Of the symptoms in that list, my ME only has the sleep disturbance. I don't consider my lack of energy to be fatigue as per the proper definition of fatigue. We had a thread earlier about fatigue not being the right word for what we feel.

 

[SlamDancin]

I believe the main connection here is hypoxia. Different from altitude hypoxia I believe our hypoxia is more localized. Dr Van Elazzaker (sp?) presented recently that brain changes after exercise in ME/CFS resembled to him to be hypoxia.

 

[kangaSue]

I think these couple of papers covers a lot of aspects of this;
https://www.jci.org/articles/view/84433
https://www.jci.org/articles/view/90055

 

[SlamDancin]

@kangaSue Just from a veryyy brief look at that first paper, I believe this part here is basically what we may be dealing with, and as it mentions hypoxia can be very personal and very localized.

O2 plays a vital role in eukaryotic metabolism as the terminal electron acceptor of the mitochondrial electron transport chain, which is responsible for generating the majority of ATP produced by a cell (5). Indeed, eukaryotic cells have developed a strong degree of dependence upon the availability of sufficient levels of O2 to maintain biological activity and remain viable.
Hypoxia occurs when oxygen demand exceeds supply, and as such represents a significant threat to bioenergetic homeostasis and cell survival. A number of recent studies have demonstrated that the microenvironment at sites of inflammation often becomes profoundly hypoxic. Inflammatory pathologies in which tissue hypoxia has been documented include atherosclerosis, rheumatoid arthritis, obesity, infection, ischemic disease, cancer, and inflammatory bowel disease (6). The occurrence of hypoxia at sites of inflammation is due to a combination of increased oxygen demand and decreased supply. Oxygen consumption is elevated at inflammatory sites due to the high metabolic demand associated with active inflammation, which is necessary to sustain the synthesis of inflammatory mediators, enzymes, and cytokines (6, 7). In addition, infiltrating neutrophils at sites of inflammation contribute to hypoxia, as these cells require high levels of oxygen to support the oxidative burst that is used as an endogenous antimicrobial strategy (8, 9). Reduced oxygenation of inflamed tissues is of particular relevance in chronic inflammatory diseases of the intestine, such as inflammatory bowel disease, where the development of thrombosis, fibrosis, and associated vascular dysfunction often leads to diminished tissue perfusion (10, 11). Therefore, hypoxia is a common feature of the microenvironment of chronically inflamed tissues

 

[SlamDancin]

Diminished tissue perfusion seems to be happening in the brain and possibly in the muscles in ME/CFS. Also, like with those pwME who have stomach pain, may have decreased perfusion in the colon. For me, I have so many physical structural deformities (scoliosis etc) that I believe there are perfusion problems for me in certain areas. This according to @necessary8 may kick off a process of exosome signaling as an emergency way of supplying energy to the hypoperfused tissue. Unfortunately these exosomes seem to be causing a lot of problems. When particles exosome size were filtered out of pwME plasma in Ron Davis’ experiment, the impedance signals disappeared. Of course we don’t know yet what that means exactly.

 

[kangaSue]

I'm not a pwME (just here to hijack some of the research) but I have a lot of experience with severe stomach pain and decreased perfusion of the colon, i.e., in having gastroparesis and also being diagnosed with chronic mesenteric ischemia (which typically causes epigastric pain).
I also have Nutcracker Syndrome (NCS - an occluded left renal vein) as part of it all and something that I want to make you aware of is that scoliosis can also be a cause of NCS.
NCS can also cause orthostatic intolerance (POTS in about 20% of cases) and symptoms of chronic fatigue and I've seen a few instances where NCS has been first, wrongly diagnosed as CFS.

 

[hellytheelephant]

I can confirm the similarity between ME and Altitude sickness.During a period when my health improved ( past tense sadly!) I experienced bad Altitude sickness whilst staying in La Paz, Bolivia. It is the highest capital in the world and 3,500 m above sea level.

It was exactly like ME symptoms- felt ill like flu malaise, and had awful pain in my head, really hard to walk etc. To make matters worse, to get anywhere in the city you have to climb hills.

Some locals advised us to drink Coca tea, and the problem was sorted! BTW: It was just tea bags in a pot in a café not bought from a drug dealer.