This is a kind of bizarre but interesting study. I don't pretend to understand what it means and they were just exploring activity patterns but I think this disease does entail a 'loss of complexity'. How interesting it is that they mention that the same thing occurs in aging and neurodegenerative diseases - how many of us have thought we feel like we're 80 years old at times.
There is reduced heart rate variability - which connotes another kind of loss of complexity but the disease itself feels like a loss of complexity has occurred; it feels like one is functioning on a more primitive level. Spontaneity is reduced, physical movements are coarser, coordination suffers, cognition is impaired - many of the fine aspects of life seem to disappear under the mixed up, jumbled nature of the disease.
So this loss of complexity fits with me; now if they could only explore the neurological source of that loss - rather than studying movement patters.
"Reduced similarity across timescales was accompanied by an increase in fractal dimension or, alternatively, by a reduced fractal scaling exponent, in keeping with previous studies of complexity loss through ageing and neurodegenerative disease [12]. These findings support our hypothesis that CFS cases would show greater evidence of reduced complexity than controls and are in keeping with the model of disease as loss of complexity [11]."
http://www.bpsmedicine.com/content/3/1/7
There is reduced heart rate variability - which connotes another kind of loss of complexity but the disease itself feels like a loss of complexity has occurred; it feels like one is functioning on a more primitive level. Spontaneity is reduced, physical movements are coarser, coordination suffers, cognition is impaired - many of the fine aspects of life seem to disappear under the mixed up, jumbled nature of the disease.
So this loss of complexity fits with me; now if they could only explore the neurological source of that loss - rather than studying movement patters.
"Reduced similarity across timescales was accompanied by an increase in fractal dimension or, alternatively, by a reduced fractal scaling exponent, in keeping with previous studies of complexity loss through ageing and neurodegenerative disease [12]. These findings support our hypothesis that CFS cases would show greater evidence of reduced complexity than controls and are in keeping with the model of disease as loss of complexity [11]."
http://www.bpsmedicine.com/content/3/1/7
-)[yes there are clearer ways to explain, but this is how I remember it], and our general muscle weakness, than it stands to reason that PWC's won't have good heart rate variability.