Patterns of control beliefs in chronic fatigue syndrome: results of a population-based survey

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Techs

Messages
22
Snowdrop said:
Or another way to look at it is that you were already ill at a level that may not have had large symptoms (the kind that can be easily recognised as such) but the disease process had taken hold at the cellular level and it was making it harder to do the things a healthy person would not have had issues with.
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Yes, this is certainly a sensible way to view it, especially since I had many seemingly disconnected symptoms going back decades (all related to neuropathy, if you believe my neurologist).

But, while I'm sure I was predisposed, the question I can't answer is whether, without a final trigger, all this generalized bad health would have coalesced into an acute disease that hit me like a freight train during one very specific week (i.e., when my ragtag system fully broke). The stress was situational, severe, chronic, and unavoidable -- not merely a tweaked-up reaction to an ordinary life.

It's just hard for me to imagine becoming so fully debilitated had my circumstances been more normal. That said, others in similar circumstances would not have gotten sick if they weren't predisposed.
 
Snowdrop

Snowdrop

Rebel without a biscuit
Messages
2,933
Techs said:
But, while I'm sure I was predisposed, the question I can't answer is whether, without a final trigger, all this generalized bad health would have coalesced into an acute disease that hit me like a freight train during one very specific week (i.e., when my ragtag system fully broke).
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An answer to this question can't come soon enough.

At times I think everyone comes up against a more stressful than normal situation and yes many (lucky them) don't get sick. I think that extra stress can be viewed as contributing to a decline in function where it's very noticeable that we are ill.

I have found that my compromised functioning means that I can not give the energy needed to special stress situations where healthy people might initially flounder but rally and deal thus reducing the stress whereas the stress continues because I have no resources to bring to resolve it. This all depends as well of course on personal abilities/styles of how we respond to stress too. But often this is seen (by others) as the whole picture rather than an inability due to lack of capacity to engage with the issue.
 
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joshualevy

Senior Member
Messages
169
alex3619 said:
Keeping that in mind this should be considered at best a pilot study. I hope any follow-up study has a much better design.
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I don't understand why you would consider this a pilot study. Pilot studies are usually small and often don't have control groups. This study is quite large and has two different comparison groups. It may be wrong or poorly designed, but I don't see it as being a "pilot" study.
 
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RogerBlack

Senior Member
Messages
902
Techs said:
It's just hard for me to imagine becoming so fully debilitated had my circumstances been more normal. That said, others in similar circumstances would not have gotten sick if they weren't predisposed.
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Or it might have happened the next year after you caught a virus that most shrugged off.

The exact chain of causation going though genetic predisposition, initial triggering event, prompt disease, recovery, and then later descent into illness isn't something that's well nailed down.
We don't know if any or all of these steps are in fact required, and what level of importance there is to each.
Or how different diseases lumped in as CFS enter or leave this tree.

How many people in the population, for example get a triggering event, and then die of natural causes without going through anything more than 'I had a nasty virus once and then recovered', but 'had CFS' by some measure in that it could have been triggered into an active state in them.
 
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