Some of what I learned so far about the root cause of chronic pain & fatigue. Check out Dr. Michael Izquierdo’s book, The Pain and Instability Solution: The Science Behind Chronic Pain Relief and Excellence in Mobility, Strength and Function:
This is useful for suffers with Chronic Fatigue or Fibromyalgia used as part of the Anxiety Rescue Program
Feeling as if you are tired all the time? Join Dr. Dominic Rowley as he explains some causes of fatigue and the common medical symptom “Tired All The Time” or TATT.
Dr. Wylie, director of the Rocco Ortenzio Neuroimaging Center at Kessler Foundation, specializes in the implementation of neuroimaging techniques in rehabilitation research. CREDIT Kessler Foundation
Kessler Foundation researchers have demonstrated changes in the functional connectivity within the ‘fatigue network’ in response to cognitive fatigue. This finding, the first of its kind, was reported in Scientific Reports on December 14, 2020 in the open access article, “Using functional connectivity changes associated with cognitive fatigue to delineate a fatigue network” (doi: 10.1038//s41598-020-78768-3).
The authors are Glenn Wylie, DPhil, Brian Yao, PhD, Helen M. Genova, PhD, Michele H. Chen, PhD, and John DeLuca, PhD, of Kessler Foundation. All have faculty appointments at Rutgers New Jersey Medical School. Dr. Wylie is also a research scientist at The Department of Veterans’ Affairs War-related Injury and Illness Study Center at the New Jersey Healthcare System.
Cognitive fatigue, a troublesome symptom among healthy and clinical populations, is a major research focus at Kessler Foundation. With this study, Foundation scientists extended their exploration of the ‘fatigue network’, a set of brain regions associated with cognitive fatigue, comprising the striatum of the basal ganglia, the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex, the ventro-medial prefrontal cortex, and the anterior sula. Understanding the underlying mechanisms of cognitive fatigue is essential to the development of effective interventions for people with disabling fatigue caused by multiple sclerosis, Gulf War Illness, brain injury, chronic fatigue syndrome and other conditions.
The study was conducted at the Rocco Ortenzio Neuroimaging Center at Kessler Foundation, a specialized facility dedicated solely to rehabilitation research. The team induced cognitive fatigue in 39 healthy volunteers while they underwent functional MRI of their brain activation patterns. The participants’ fatigue in response to multiple runs of challenging tasks of working memory was measured using a visual analogue scale of fatigue (VAS-F). Researchers found that as cognitive fatigue increased, there was a decline in the connectivity among the regions that make up the fatigue network, and an increase in connectivity between the network and more posterior regions.
Dr. Wylie, director of the Ortenzio Center, commented on the results of this task-based functional neuroimaging paradigm: “Our findings provide further evidence for a functionally connected ‘fatigue network’ in the brain. More importantly, we have shown for the first time that this functional network connectivity changes in association with cognitive fatigue,” he emphasized. “This promises to accelerate progress toward effective interventions aimed at relieving debilitating fatigue.”
Many college students fully recover from infectious mononucleosis (which is almost always caused by Epstein-Barr virus) within 1-6 weeks, but some go on to develop chronic fatigue syndrome, also called myalgic encephalomyelitis (ME/CFS). A longitudinal study from DePaul University and Northwestern University followed 4,501 college students to examine risk factors that may trigger longer illness. The research appears in the journal Clinical Infectious Diseases and was funded by the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases.
Previous retrospective studies found that risk factors for developing ME/CFS after catching mono included preexisting physical symptoms and the number of days spent in bed, according to co-principal investigators Leonard A. Jason, professor of psychology at DePaul University; and Dr. Ben Z. Katz, a professor of pediatrics at Northwestern University Feinberg School of Medicine and a pediatric infectious disease specialist at Ann & Robert H. Lurie Children’s Hospital of Chicago.
“We are the only study to collect comprehensive biological and behavioral data prior to illness onset, which for the first time allowed us to identify some of the predisposing circumstances or conditions that make certain individuals more likely to get ill due to mono and stay ill,” says Jason, director of the Center for Community Research at DePaul.
Of the 4,501 college students in the study, 238 or 5.3% developed mononucleosis; and 55 of those (23%) met criteria for ME/CFS six months later, 20 of whom (8%) met criteria for severe ME/CFS. Researchers found that those who developed ME/CFS had more physical symptoms and immune irregularities at baseline, but they did not start out with statistically significantly more psychological symptoms such as stress, depression, anxiety or abnormal coping.
“Some people who are attacked by a virus stay sick. What we’ve found is that their emotional functioning and psychological states are not statistically different from those who get attacked by the same virus and recover. This becomes important validating information for those people who have this illness,” says Jason.
Participants in the study each completed seven different surveys to assess potential symptoms of ME/CFS. They also received a comprehensive psychiatric exam, and provided samples of serum, plasma and white blood cells. In future publications, researchers aim to analyze cytokine networks in participants’ blood and other risk factors. Deficiencies in certain cytokines “might suggest predisposing irregularities in immune response,” write the researchers. Vicky Whittemore, the Program Director at the National Institute of Neurological Disorders and Stroke (NINDS), stated that NINDS is supporting follow-up research to continue to study this cohort, and to examine possible predictors of COVID-19 as well.
“Since we have baseline data on nearly all of the 4500 students, we can use our same database to tease out risk factors for COVID infection as well as prolonged recovery from that illness,” says Katz.