It was one of the best webinars I have listened to, really good explanations of how certain areas of the brain light up using an adapted MRI machine. His study was a small one, only 15 ME patients versus 15 women aged around 40, all women. He had described the study as the brain on fire.
He found that certain chemicals were elevated in the patients with ME. They were choline which he said can indicate rapid cell turnover which shouldn't be happening. None of the controls showed this elevated choline.
Another elevated chemical was lactate which he said usually you wouldn't see this in the brain, none of the controls had this. Elevated lactate levels also showed increased cell turnover in the brain and in the ME patients was 4 times higher than in the controls. I think he said that running out of oxygen or exceeding your ability to make oxygen could cause this neuroinflammation.
The fascinating thing about the research was that the areas that lit up were ones like the hippocampus, cerebellum, insular and a few others I didn't get to write down. All these were involved in what Jarred called the sickness response causing the same sort of symptoms you get when you have flu. Things like malaise, headaches, muscle pains, depression, anxiety, balance issues and of course pain and several others I didn't write down but all of them can be experienced by sufferers of ME.
A couple of other brain chemicals myo-inositol and N-acetylaspartate showed no difference in levels in ME patients v controls but he said this was a good thing because he thought it meant there wasn't permanent brain damage unlike some other neurological diseases like Parkinsons, MS, Alzheimers. N-acetylaspartate would be at a high level as a sign of a healthy brain.
He stressed the whole picture involved neuroinflammation and when looking for treatments it would probably involve anti-inflammatories that could cross the blood brain barrier. So far there were none that he knew of. LDN was mentioned but he said it wasn't perfect because it suppressed neutrons as well as the glial cells whereas we needed just the microglial cells turned off.
He also mentioned some herbals like curcumin or boswellia might be helpful but he was doing a blinded study at present to see if they would work to calm the neuroinflammation.
One method that might be helpful he described as brain cooling but so far there were only invasive ways of doing this although he said that now there was a vagus nerve stimulator that could be trialled.
There were some good questions but I had better stop as I have a migraine developing.
Pam