In the News
Keep up to date with the latest news articles from around the world.
Articles represent the views of their authors and not ME/CFS SA. Always seek advice from a registered health practitioner before changing your care plan.
01 September, 2024
Are You Suffering From Hyper-Fatigue? As Experts Say It's The New Epidemic, The Signs To Look Out For... And When Doctors Say You Need To Seek Help
Modern life can frazzle the best of us. A survey by YouGov found that one in eight Brits 'exist in a state of constant exhaustion', and a quarter feel tired most of the time. Another poll found that 55 per cent of us describe ourselves as 'hyper-fatigued' – a phrase that originated from a 2023 trends report by the market research firm Mintel, and related to consumers being bombarded by too much information. 'The pandemic, rising cost of living, energy crisis, geopolitical unrest and climate crisis are taking their toll,' it warned. But when does fatigue become a medical matter? And what can you do about it? Here are some questions to consider...
01 September, 2024
'Mystery Illness' Leaves Heather, 25, In Wheelchair As Mum Desperate For Answers
Heather Cooper was an aspiring artist, keen cyclist and student at Newcastle College when she began experiencing migraines — she is now in a wheelchair and 'deteriorating'.
31 August, 2024
Replicated Blood-Based Biomarkers For Myalgic Encephalomyelitis Not Explicable By Inactivity
Myalgic Encephalomyelitis (ME; sometimes referred to as chronic fatigue syndrome) is a relatively common and female-biased disease of unknown pathogenesis that profoundly decreases patients’ health-related quality-of-life. ME diagnosis is hindered by the absence of robustly-defined and specific biomarkers that are easily measured from available sources such as blood, and unaffected by ME patients’ low level of physical activity. Previous studies of blood biomarkers have not yielded replicated results, perhaps due to low study sample sizes (n < 100). Here, we use UK Biobank (UKB) data for up to 1,455 ME cases and 131,303 population controls to discover hundreds of molecular and cellular blood traits that differ significantly between cases and controls.
31 August, 2024
Can Ketamine Treat Fibromyalgia Pain?
At a time when the medical and recreational use of ketamine is coming under more scrutiny from law enforcement, a new study highlights its potential value as a treatment for fibromyalgia pain.
31 August, 2024
Rheumatology Perspective: Will NASEM’s New Long COVID Definition Aid Diagnosis, Treatment?
On June 11, the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering and Medicine issued the result of their lengthy deliberations to develop a consensus definition for long COVID.
30 August, 2024
Long COVID Diagnostic With Differentiation From Chronic Lyme Disease Using Machine Learning And Cytokine Hubs
The absence of a long COVID (LC) or post-acute sequelae of COVID-19 (PASC) diagnostic has profound implications for research and potential therapeutics given the lack of specificity with symptom-based identification of LC and the overlap of symptoms with other chronic inflammatory conditions. Here, we report a machine-learning approach to LC/PASC diagnosis on 347 individuals using cytokine hubs that are also capable of differentiating LC from chronic lyme disease (CLD). We derived decision tree, random forest, and gradient-boosting machine (GBM) classifiers and compared their diagnostic capabilities on a dataset partitioned into training (178 individuals) and evaluation (45 individuals) sets. The GBM model generated 89% sensitivity and 96% specificity for LC with no evidence of overfitting. We tested the GBM on an additional random dataset (106 LC/PASC and 18 Lyme), resulting in high sensitivity (97%) and specificity (90%) for LC. We constructed a Lyme Index confirmatory algorithm to discriminate LC and CLD.
30 August, 2024
Paint And Pain In Hurt’s Locker
Bakula Nayak channels her anguish to communicate with the world through embroidered and illustrated works on archival paper. Artists do inhabit a different reality. Bakula Nayak’s reality is filled with pieces of memories—postcards, letters, old bills, doctor’s prescriptions… things that, say, a layman would probably chuck into the trash. However, it is Nayak’s world of pain—she suffers from fibromyalgia and hashimoto which causes muscle pain and chronic fatigue.
29 August, 2024
Long COVID Puzzle Pieces Are Falling Into Place – The Picture Is Unsettling
The intense scientific effort that long COVID sparked has resulted in more than 24,000 scientific publications, making it the most researched health condition in any four years of recorded human history.
29 August, 2024
Brighton Mum Creates World's Largest Long-Covid Programme
A woman has supported over 800 people after creating the world's largest live long-Covid recovery programme. Brighton resident Suzy Bolt, 52, set up her support programme after contracting Coronavirus in March 2020.
28 August, 2024
It's 2024 And We're Still Living With COVID-19
At the close of 2023, almost 800 million cases of COVID-19 had been diagnosed around the world, with more than seven million deaths recorded. There were more than 200 reported symptoms of long COVID and its impact on multiple organ systems. New 2024-2025 vaccines are prepared for a September launch.
