Hello everyone, I hope you’re doing fine! Today I’ve read this tweet presenting a new hypothesis for ME subtypes involving insulin. The preprint video can be watched here:
@glenn_chan what is your opinion on this? Did you already see it? I cant judge because I lack the technical knowledge but it seems well-reasoned.
ps: For people only interested in resulting possible treatments (Remember that this is an unverified hypothesis!! and the author is a researcher, not a doctor):
There’s a lot of theory-crafting out there. I don’t think that we’re going to find a simple cause for ME/CFS. It’s probably multiple things that cause it and people just have a different combination of those causes.
Some things to keep in mind:
Patients have tried a lot of treatments. Out of that list- Statins, metformin, beta blockers have been popular things that people have tried. The ME/CFS community tried low dose Abilify / aripiprazole.
GWAS studies (genetic studies) for Long COVID didn’t find any genetic predispositions (other than 1 gene). Usually they find that multiple genes are linked to a condition, even if it’s something that you get from the environment (e.g. some people have genes that make them resistant to the HIV virus). This suggests to me that Long COVID (which is similar to ME/CFS) is a collection of related conditions and that they don’t all have the same underlying cause.
There have been different groups analyzing symptoms with clustering techniques to figure out if there are subtypes of Long COVID. The clusters are largely related to how patients answer surveys (there are different styles) and there aren’t strong clusters for their medical symptoms. Such clusters may exist but they are probably subtle clusters if they do exist.
