Weak Facial muscles

[ChrisD]

Just like all the other muscles in my body that have gone through mild atrophy, I’ve recently realised that I’ve lost a lot of muscle and also subcutaneous fat on my face. Now I’m even finding it difficult to make and hold a smile as the muscle just hurts and twitches - this is probably down to deconditioning too.

It’s strange because I’m 29 and look quite young still when my face is still but when I smile now everything looks really tight and strained, and I have wrinkles around my eyes. I don’t think it could be described as normal aging, and I’d love to think that this is all reversible by correcting underlying illness and putting back on the muscle and fat.

I have Lyme and ME, so as well as poor muscle function there is this collagen synthesis issue from Lyme disease.

 

[SlamDancin]

This topic is basically going on in several threads. Tomorrow, as a final piece to my PT regimen I’m getting fitted for a mouth guard to fix the postural problems in my jaw (pretty hard to do otherwise) and like Jen Brea has said when you have weakened connective tissue it causes problems in distal parts of the body. So my facial and jaw posture not only contributes to cervical compression (mine isn’t major I don’t think) but it weakened my lower left back which may causing an abdominal compression syndrome. Probably a major source of triggers for this illness come from hypoxic/ischemic syndromes, which I need to confirm through testing, still speculation but I definitely fit the phenotype. I’ve had abdominal pain for most of my life and OI and get PEM badly from exercise. I’m pretty sure PEM is a protective measure against hypoxic stresses and possibly inflammatory neovascularization as the body builds collateral capillaries and veins to handle the blood flow that can’t get through due to postural dysfunction. There’s a thread here now on Nutcracker syndrome which I believe I have which can cause local hypoxia. This figures into @necessary8 ‘s hypothesis where local hypoxia can result in systemic NOX produced oxidative stress which leads to the RBC deformability problems seen by Stanford researchers. Fix the original structural problems and seemingly the CFS goes away pretty fast.