Question for patients with #ME/CFS 👉 Do any of you feel that during a PEM “crash” you crave sugar/carbs or feel continually hungry despite eating normal amounts of food? Thanks
Thank you all for these responses!! I asked b/c I have a friend w/ #ME/CFS who is starving all the time, especially for sugar/carbs...but actually struggles to keep on weight despite that. Get’s worse during PEM 👉 I wanted to see if other patients experience something similar...
2/ It seems that many of you do indeed experience something similar - and the way you describe it is helpful for me. It does seem like there’s an “air hunger” or bottomless pitt feeling to it
I don’t have an easy explanation at all for the symptoms! 😅 But I do have some thoughts/hypotheses derived from research taking place in the growing field of #immunometabolism
4/ I’m particularly interested in what’s called the #Warburg Effect: a process which a range of human cell types switch their mitchondrial #metabolism under conditions of activation/proliferation to use more #glucose...and then release lactate as a result: onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/abs/10.100…
5/ Remember how this team found increased #lactate in the blood of patients w/ ME/CFS after a PEM exercise challenge (up to 72 hrs later) 👉 I wonder if the Warburg Effect in certain immune cells might be contributing to the lactate production: physoc.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.14…
6/ Especially b/c a growing # of studies show that a range of immune cells will go into a Warburg Effect state based on the exposure to #bacterial byproducts like LPS in the blood, or because they are directly infected by intracellular pathogens: ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/m/pubmed/29603…
7/ And there have been teams that show increases in bacteria in ME/CFS blood after exercise challenge (ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/P…) or more LPS generally in ME/CFS blood (ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/m/pubmed/27338…)
8/ Anyway if the Warburg Effect is happening in certain immune cells due to LPS etc after an exercise challenge you’d expect patients to crave #glucose (sugar)...b/c (as I mentioned) such cells need more glucose for the effect to start
9/ Those are my thoughts thus far and my goal is to keep researching the topic and see if maybe we could measure #metabolites tied to the Warburg Effect in future ME/CFS exercise challenge studies
10/ If you don’t follow what I’m saying don’t worry - it’s complicated and not worth overthinking until we might actually be able to do some testing to see if my thinking is even plausible! I could be totally wrong:)
