Since a few people tagged me I guess I have to make a comment about this.
So.
First of all, two things.
1. As some of you already noticed, the intracellular signaling network that AMPK is a part of, is really fucking complicated. Its nowhere near as simple as "we're sick because AMPK is low, we need to take drugs that will make it higher". I mean, technically, it could be something like that, but it also could be a 100 different things.
2. While I really like this paper's findings, I still believe that they do not explain any of our symptoms in any even remotely direct way. I said it before and I will say it again: your cells not having enough energy does not directly make you tired. At least not to my knowledge (if someone can prove me wrong on this, PM me).
Now, with that said:
This is very good research. Very important, in my opinion. Not the study discussed in this thread specifically, but the one to which it is a continuation - the study from 2015 where they demonstrated impaired AMPK activation and glucose uptake in cultured muscle cells. This study:
http://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0122982 I somehow missed it earlier, and it has only come to my attention recently, when the continuation was published.
The reason why I believe it to be very important is that this is the first study that I've seen that demonstrates altered cellular energy homeostasis in muscle cells. That last part is important. I explained why here:
http://forums.phoenixrising.me/inde...nic-fatigue-syndrome.55689/page-2#post-929359
And because of this research, and because of a few other things that were brought to my attention recently, the AMPK angle was bumped up to the top of my list of stuff to consider, and I am now extensively looking into the relevant literature. I will try to find a way to tie this to the symptoms, and maybe an actual hypothesis will emerge from it. Im not sure if I will post about it like I did with the CD39 hypothesis - explaining this so that everyone can understand takes a loooot of energy. So probably I will go straight to the researchers with my findings. But maybe I will give you guys a short summary. We'll see. It probably wont be anytime soon though. Lots of papers to read, very little energy.