A.B.
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Will there be a Phoenix Rising article, or summary of this conference (of the biomedical stuff, I don't care about the babble) ? I found the stream impossible to follow due to sound qualities.
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Sorry to drag things back to yesterday's Mark Edwards presentation on a new MRC-funded project. There was some interesting stuff today (more on Collin study later)
He doesn't like Freudian explanations/hysteria, or reattribution (interpreting emotional problems as physical symptoms, if I understand right) - but he is big on abnormal illness beliefs, the result, in his view, of flawed learnig styles. Who knows, maybe he's right - some of the slides were interesting, and as you say were hard to interpret without the background. But the conclusion seemed pretty unambiguous:
Will there be a Phoenix Rising article, or summary of this conference (of the biomedical stuff, I don't care about the babble) ? I found the stream impossible to follow due to sound qualities.
Actually, the majority of people working in psychiatry research today are trying to find biological mechanisms and biological treatments for psych diseases. This psychobabble stuff is a minority sport these days, used mostly in contexts where medicine has no answers and has to come up with fake answers to try and save face.
Not exactly who I'd have chosen...AfME have already said that they'll produce an article.
Poor sound quality but a huge wake up call by George Davey Smith for much bigger, sharper studies. Holgate now
Picking up on the theme, saying we need to collaborate and pool resources and more funds
Not exactly who I'd have chosen...
I only jotted down a few notes from Mark Edwards talk yesterday near the beginning.
I thought he said that his research was in collaboration with others, including Neil Harrison (Sussex) and that they were looking at the mechanisms in the brain that could be going wrong in PEM.
To elicit "sickness behavior" in healthy people, they gave typhoid vaccine (live). Scans showed that this caused an activation of the insula in the brain. Also the degree of insula activation was proportional to the level of "sickness" symptoms. Sorry I didn't hear/note the type of scanning used.
My understanding is that they will now look for possible similarities in PWME.
Neil Harrison spoke at IiME in May. He's newish to ME, but seemed very biomedically/neurologically based.
I only briefly looked at the "Pink Elephant" slides briefly as the psycho/socio ... does my head in, and I'm not trying to defend him.
I just think we should maybe understand a bit more about the project, before he gets chucked out with the bathwater.
Or I might just have misheard him. His talk was before some kind person said there was a volume control on the live stream.
Can't they easily dodge this one by claiming that if PWME really were physically ill they would indeed feel ill, but genuinely rather than spuriously as at present?If the false belief was that I was terribly ill (which seems the psychotherapists idea) then even if I was ill I would feel fine.
If he is claiming it is learning styles then he needs to show that many people with a learning style have such problem. If he is post testing (ie after people are ill) then learning styles may reflect ways of dealing with cognitive issues.
Can't they easily dodge this one by claiming that if PWME really were physically ill they would indeed feel ill, but genuinely rather than spuriously as at present?
It looks to me as if this new project actually IS on ME and will be closer to the work Neil has published on the effects of typhoid vaccine on thinking - which is essentially a model for brain fog and sensitivity to adverse stimuli with systemic inflammatory signals...........
........The impression I get is that the researchers are taking the view that somehow the sorts of signals that occur in infection and make us feel lousy and unable to think go on interfering with brain function and resurface big time in PEM in ME/CFS.
I was pretty comfortable with Marks Edwards' presentation at the conference, if not bowled over, but when I got back and logged onto PR I was perplexed why everyone was up in arms. Quite apart from his back catalogue, it seems to be down to the announcement that AfME made on Facebook. The quotation in the middle came from the conference presentation but AfME slipped in the sections I have bolded. Treatment interventions weren't mentioned at the conference. He seems to favour CBT for functional neurological symptoms.The impression I get is that the researchers are taking the view that somehow the sorts of signals that occur in infection and make us feel lousy and unable to think go on interfering with brain function and resurface big time in PEM in ME/CFS. The idea is to try to image that happening so that it can be studied objectively. This may not be so new - it is similar to the idea behind the Japanese study and all the stuff on microglia - but I think it has to be a good place to look.
Dr Mark Edwards has confirmed that the Medical Research Council has made a £600,000 contribution to the overall cost of his study to seek a unified mechanism for functional neurological symptoms.
Speaking at the UK CFS/M.E. Research Collaborative conference in Newcastle this afternoon, Dr Edwards, who is an Honorary Consultant Neurologist at the National Hospital for Neurology and Neurosurgery, explained how he wants to test a new theory for how functional symptoms can arise from the brain.
He says: “We believe that fatigue in CFS may occur because of abnormal activation of a network of structures in the brain that are usually involved in signalling the presence of infection and inflammation in the body. These give rise to a common set of symptoms experienced by everyone (and indeed across species) when infection or inflammation occur (known as the "sickness response").
“This sickness response is usually short-lived, but we believe that the system could be abnormally activated in people with CFS in the absence of any ongoing infection or inflammation in the body.
Dr Edwards will test if particular aspects of brain function become more normal when people with functional symptoms go through successful treatment. He says: “This would be a key step in proving or disproving our theory for how functional symptoms can be produced by the brain, and will help with future treatment development.”
Just look at the fact that 600k plus has been awarded to "functional neurological disorders" for a supposed biomedical ME project and tell me again that psychiatry has moved in the right direction.
There was no mention of 'recovery' at the conference yesterday. The title of the presentation was 'Imaging the correlates of Post-Exertional Malaise' and the basic idea was do scans and take bloods before and after individually tailored exercise. It sounded very much like a 2-day affair.(I realise I'm just going off a v brief summary of the study design and don't really know what I'm talking about, but if there's any truth to the idea that the plan is to compare bran scans of people who report improving/recovering with others, then this seems like a really crap idea. Also - this group may have different problems to those who don't recover, etc, etc).
There was no mention of 'recovery' at the conference yesterday. The title of the presentation was 'Imaging the correlates of Post-Exertional Malaise' and the basic idea was do scans and take bloods before and after individually tailored exercise. It sounded very much like a 2-day affair.
Because AfME are reporting it in a rather different way.Maybe wires have got crossed then.
I hadn't heard that. Perhaps a report from the IiME conference?I do remember some talk of prioritising research to find out why some people recovered a while back.
I hadn't heard that.
What we really, really need is a proper summary of the study design.