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We Finally Know What Drives Chronic Fatigue Syndrome (and Long-Covid)
The most convincing breakthrough yet in the key pathomechanisms (patho- means disease) involved.
In 1955, an outbreak of encephalomyelitis struck the Royal Free Hospital Group in London, U.K., hospitalizing over 200 patients. Encephalomyelitis is the inflammation of the brain and spinal cord, typically caused by infections. But what’s intriguing is that about 2% of the patients developed what is known today as myalgic encephalomyelitis or chronic fatigue syndrome (ME/CFS), which is also a subtype of long-Covid.
This incident was published in the British Medical Journal in 1957, which is likely the earliest record of ME/CFS. But the subsequent decades were met with widespread skepticism about this condition. A few experts even believed ME/CFS is psychosocial, a hysteria of some sort. As a result, the amount of research done on ME/CFS was pitiful. Getting funding to do research on ME/CFS was notoriously hard as well.
Today, we’re paying the price. The pathomechanisms (patho- means disease) of ME/CFS — as well as its risk factors, prognosis, and treatments — remain poorly understood. We have bits of studies covering different pathomechanisms of ME/CFS but none were unifying and convincing.
