Could Broderick be our Einstein? OK – so Einstein is a bit much to lay on anyone. Broderick, like Einstein, though, can quickly leave your head spinning – even his own team doesn’t always understand what he’s saying, and he wants to fundamentally change the way we approach illness. If he has his way, researchers will be dealing with chronic illnesses in a very different manner in the future.
The first two talks are from the two bioengineering/data mining/modelling experts at the Institute of Neuroimmune Studies at Nova Southeastern University, Gordon Broderick and Travis Fletcher. They’ll be presenting the culmination of eight years of work analyzing hundreds of thousands of data points gathered before, during and after, the big “E”– exercise.
They have data on what’s going on with your genes, hormones, cytokines, immune cells, the neuropeptides while your body is breaking down during exercise. It’s clearly the biggest dataset ever produced on what’s happening during exercise in these disorders.
They used those millions of data points to build explanatory models of disease. We may have gotten a taste of what’s coming year or so ago when Doctor Klimas said, if I remember correctly, that the autonomic nervous system tanks first during exercise – and then drags the immune system down with it.
The NSU team wants to break the chains that are keeping ME/CFS in place That would be more than enough, but it’s not all. They’ve also built virtual models to identify which medications might work best and in what order to get ME/CFS patients out of the “homeostatic lockdown” they’re in. (If you remember, the NSU team believes ME/CFS and GWS patients have their systems set at a “new normal” – a suboptimal set point – that resists movement. That “new normal” brings to mind Dr. Cheney’s statement years ago that after he pushes ME/CFS patients towards health something pushes them back. )
If you can figure out what’s keeping the system stuck in “illness mode”, you have a chance at getting it unstuck. The next step for this very creative group is to initiate clinical trials, and it sounds like they may be in the process of doing that. We’ll see how far they’ve gotten in the two talks – that by themselves are obviously worth the price of admission.
Read more: Increasing Energy in Neuroimmune Disorders: The Klimas Patient Conference
http://www.cortjohnson.org/blog/2015/01/31/increasing-energy-neuroimmune-klimas/