BurnA
Senior Member
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I am not sure that Mark Edwards has a particular hypothesis for PEM. His hypothesis was about movement disorders. But even so I see no conflict. At any one time there may be immune loops or neural loops or both.
I really don't think you need to worry too much about the functional terminology. As Mark Edwards indicate sin his presentation he is really only interested in biochemical and neural mechanism. In this sense functional means working abnormally without any evident structural change. One could call autoimmunity functional in the same sense - there is no structural change in the bone marrow or lymph nodes and the cells are quite normal in the way they go about things. It is just that the functional outcome is disastrous.
I cannot see why people are being so negative about choosing people with PEM. Edwards is a neurologist. Harrison knows all about ME classification and PEM - he is not new to the field. Why would they want to do a study on PEM without making sure they had appropriate patients?
On a practical level what could this study reveal for patients, and how could it lead to treatments ?