How do mild patients fit into the deconditioned model?
My wife is mild-to-moderate, so I can only comment on the basis of that. I have no medical expertise.
I rather think the answer to your question is: Not much, if anything, at all. Although my wife is limited in what she can do, she is able (and determined) to do more than enough I think to stave off any significant deconditioning. In fact because she strives hard within her limits, I would guess your average couch potato is considerably more deconditioned than my wife.
So taking two extremes (which is often a good way to come at a problem), and assuming that someone with mild ME probably has no deconditioning, and severe ME inevitably does have
consequential and supplementary deconditioning, there must be some sort of relationship between ME severity and deconditioning. I imagine that if you were to draw a graph of ME severity along one axis, and consequential deconditioning along the other axis, the line would look very non-linear (just a hunch on my part). I suspect it would start off low and stay low a good way through the ME severity axis, and then start to curve up evermore sharply towards the severe and very severe end.
And I have to emphasise again, any deconditioning I'm talking about, is as a
consequence of (probably severe) ME.
I wonder if any research has ever been done on this at all. Could you advise at all
@Keith Geraghty?