https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2024/03/240321155335.htm
"The lungs are using the same sensors and neurons in the pain pathway to let the brain know there's an infection," says Dr. Bryan Yipp, MD '05, MSc'05, clinician researcher at the Cumming School of Medicine and senior author on the study. "The brain prompts the symptoms associated with sickness; that overall feeling of being unwell, feeling tired and loosing your appetite. The discovery indicates we may have to treat the nervous system as well as the infection."
I think that challenges the claims that ME symptoms are "just (mis?)perceptions". If lung infections can make the brain experience feeling tired, unwell, etc, it's quite reasonable for other signals to do the same. That's in addition to the possibility that the circuitry that leads to those feelings can be mis-triggering, or producing higher-magnitude outputs from normal inputs.
For PWME who have breathing problems due to ME, or whose breathing problems affect their ME, this brain-lung connection might be involved.
"The lungs are using the same sensors and neurons in the pain pathway to let the brain know there's an infection," says Dr. Bryan Yipp, MD '05, MSc'05, clinician researcher at the Cumming School of Medicine and senior author on the study. "The brain prompts the symptoms associated with sickness; that overall feeling of being unwell, feeling tired and loosing your appetite. The discovery indicates we may have to treat the nervous system as well as the infection."
I think that challenges the claims that ME symptoms are "just (mis?)perceptions". If lung infections can make the brain experience feeling tired, unwell, etc, it's quite reasonable for other signals to do the same. That's in addition to the possibility that the circuitry that leads to those feelings can be mis-triggering, or producing higher-magnitude outputs from normal inputs.
For PWME who have breathing problems due to ME, or whose breathing problems affect their ME, this brain-lung connection might be involved.