quenched (u/quenched)

quenched commented on In the 1980s we downloaded games from the radio newslttrs.com/yes-in-the-... · Posted by u/spzb

nunez · a year ago

Insane that there are people denying that this happened. I wasn't born during this period, but being able to download stuff off of terrestrial radio is completely believable. What do people think Wi-Fi or cellular networks are???

quenched · a year ago

I did this in New Zealand around 1985-6 on Saturday mornings around 930 IIRC. It was recorded onto cassette tape and then loaded into our BBC Micro B. We couldn't afford a disk drive. I can also remember typing in many BASIC programs from magazine listings. That was how we learned.

quenched commented on Research reveals new clues to the mysteries of long Covid ualberta.ca/en/folio/2024... · Posted by u/amichail

quenched · a year ago

Thread for this paper on Science For ME [0].

[0] https://www.s4me.info/threads/exploring-the-role-of-galectin...

quenched commented on An analysis of studies pertaining to masks from 1978 to 2023 medrxiv.org/content/10.11... · Posted by u/ohshit

quenched · 2 years ago

For an up to date meta-analysis, see Masks and respirators for prevention of respiratory infections: a state of the science review (2024, Clinical Microbiology Reviews)

https://journals.asm.org/doi/10.1128/cmr.00124-23

quenched commented on A protein that disrupts cells’ energy centers may be a culprit in CFS/ME science.org/content/artic... · Posted by u/kens

krisoft · 3 years ago

> If it turns out that ME/CFS doesn't has a physical marker, then what?

The problem is that ME/CFS is similar in presentation to other conditions such as for example certain kinds of depression. The difference is that exercise is thought to help with those conditions and exacerbates ME/CFS. Thus there are two different groups of people, one who you are helping by encouraging them to exercise and one who you are harming. If you can't tell them apart the system is bound to hurt someone.

quenched · 3 years ago

> The difference is that exercise is thought to help with those conditions and exacerbates ME/CFS

It's proven to be the case. A repeat cardiopulmonary exercise (2-day CPET) is currently the only widely replicated biomarker for ME/CFS. Only ME/CFS shows a reduction in performance and a lowering of ventilatory threshold on the second day. Anyone else (sedentary, cancer, heart or lung disease, MS, depression) will show an improvement. [1]

A study this year showed a striking effect looking at the metabolites in urine after exercising female ME patients vs sedentary healthy controls. The ME patients just did not excrete metabolites as the healthy controls did. [2]

"This indicates that ME/CFS patients have a general metabolic dysregulation that is part of their exercise intolerance and PEM in which altered metabolic excretion is a contributing factor."

There's also a very simple clinical discriminator between ME/CFS and depression. If you ask a depressed person what they would do if they were suddenly cured, their answer will be "Not sure, I don't know, I can't think of anything, nothing really." If you ask someone with ME/CFS the same question, the response would be "Go to the shops, drive my car, walk on the beach, see my friends... etc".

[1] https://www.mdpi.com/2227-9032/8/3/192

[2] https://www.mdpi.com/1422-0067/24/4/3685

quenched commented on A protein that disrupts cells’ energy centers may be a culprit in CFS/ME science.org/content/artic... · Posted by u/kens

circlefavshape · 3 years ago

> doctors dismiss patients as crazy or "making it up"

It's very easy to frame what doctors say like this, but in my experience at least that's not really what they're doing. A doctor is a classification machine - they take your symptoms as inputs and output a disease or a syndrome, hopefully with mitigation measures associated with it.

When my wife had long covid for 3 years and doctors couldn't find anything wrong with her a neurologist diagnosed her with a "functional neurological disorder" and suggested psychiatry. My wife felt dismissed and was really mad about it, but the reality is that some sets of symptoms are psychosomatic, and psychiatry can help, so if the neurologist saw 100 people with my wife's symptoms and made the same recommendation to them all, some of them would benefit (as opposed to her making no diagnosis and none of them benefiting)

quenched · 3 years ago

There is no evidence for functional neurological disorder, it is simply a hypothesis. As a diagnostic category it is essentially a "god of the gaps" construct. Remember also that the name is a re-branding of what used to be called conversion disorder (previously known as hysteria), that was found to be an acceptable term to patients.[1]

It's heavily published on and widely accepted as valid by neurologists, but that does not make it true.

The concept with FND is that there is no identifiable structural pathology, but that the neural circuits are dysfunctional, and that this can be fixed with things like cognitive behavioural therapy. This is typically framed to the patient as "the hardware is completely OK, there's just a problem with the software." (As most of this audience would recognise there is very little overlap between how brains work and how computers work.)

However, more advanced imaging techniques, such as 7T MRI are now showing structural abnormalities in these patients, which is a pretty fundamental problem for the above hypothesis. An attempt to rationalise this by FND proponents is made here.[2]

A recent example involves a 10yo child who developed a movement disorder following Covid.[3] Typically these would be diagnosed as functional movement disorder [4][5][6] and psychological therapy advised. However this group showed that in fact it was due to a neuroimmune pathology, with auto-antibodies forming that targeted some portion of the basal ganglia. The patient recovered completely with immunosuppression.

[1] https://www.bmj.com/content/325/7378/1449

[2] https://neurosymptoms.org/en/faq-2/can-people-with-fnd-have-...

[3] https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s00415-023-11853-5

[4] https://movementdisorders.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.100...

[5] https://cp.neurology.org/content/11/5/e686

[6] https://adc.bmj.com/content/106/5/420

quenched commented on A protein that disrupts cells’ energy centers may be a culprit in CFS/ME science.org/content/artic... · Posted by u/kens

quenched · 3 years ago

I understand there is an interesting back-story to this paper that will be published in the Washington Post next week. If the findings are replicated (they look promising) we will owe a debt to the patients involved, as well as the researchers, but in particular to the 38 yo index patient with Li Fraumeni syndrome.

quenched commented on Brandon Gilles Dies from Long-Covid, Electrical Engineer and Spatial AI Pioneer mcphagwara.com/articles/b... · Posted by u/ck2

haldujai · 3 years ago

Brandon describes slowly improving over ~1.5 years up to April 2023 when he was walking ~0.9 miles/day which so far is concordant with ME/CFS but where it gets discordant is that he progressed to multi-organ failure and death within 3 months.

I'm not questioning whether he suffered from ME/CFS but mortality is not reported in the Stanford data or what I've heard described of the syndrome.

It's hard to wrap my head around ME/CFS as he has described it being causative of organ failure. Did something happen? Is this a consequence of the therapeutic he tried?

Organ failure in a 37 year old without a history of end-organ dysfunction or acutely inciting event like a toxicity is incredibly unusual.

quenched · 3 years ago

I agree it's hard to speculate: perhaps malnutrition and cardiac failure; maybe sepsis. Here are some relevant links —

Life-Threatening Malnutrition in Very Severe ME/CFS (2021)

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC8070213/

Caring for the Patient with Severe or Very Severe Myalgic Encephalomyelitis/Chronic Fatigue Syndrome (2021)

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC8544443/

There are not many mortality studies and few ME patients have had comprehensive autopsies —

Mortality in patients with myalgic encephalomyelitis and chronic fatigue syndrome (2016)

https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/21641846.2016.1...

Causes of Death Among Patients With Chronic Fatigue Syndrome (2007)

https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/0739933060080376...

Somewhat harrowing reading is Whitney Dafoe's account of becoming extremely severe —

Extremely Severe ME/CFS—A Personal Account (2021)

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC8145314/

quenched commented on Brandon Gilles Dies from Long-Covid, Electrical Engineer and Spatial AI Pioneer mcphagwara.com/articles/b... · Posted by u/ck2

haldujai · 3 years ago

With all respect to Brandon Gilles, I have never heard of "dying from long covid" before and am trying to understand what this means.

There is a huge discrepancy and a lot of detail missing between "developed Long-COVID symptoms such as brain fog, fatigue, muscle pain and shortness of breath" and "he suffered from multiple organ failures".

I tried searching but have not found anything (yes I know some death certificates list long-covid as a contributory cause in CDC data, but one can list anything on a death certificate). Does anyone have a source/case report explaining this or detailing a case?

(Please note I am not trying to start a political debate regarding COVID out of a man's obituary, I am genuinely curious if anyone has information about this as I've never heard a causative claim before)

quenched · 3 years ago

While long Covid is an encompassing term, there is symptom overlap between long COVID and ME/CFS. Around 50% of people with long COVID meet the criteria for a diagnosis of ME/CFS.

https://www.nature.com/articles/s41577-023-00904-7

https://www.nature.com/articles/s41579-022-00846-2

https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fneur.2023.1090...

Mild ME/CFS is usually associated with around 50% reduction in daily functioning. Moderate will usually lead to people being housebound and intermittently bed-bound. Severe and very severe are associated with a level of suffering that is hard to imagine possible.

An example of someone becoming severe is PhysicsGirl - Dianna Cowern.

https://youtu.be/vydgkCCXbTA

The associated severe dysautonomia means that people are unable to sit or stand and often they can not eat or digest. They may require intravenous nutrition. Regrettably there are cases where the disease has not been treated appropriately and young people have died as a result. A recent example is Maeve Boothby-O'Neill and her father Sean O'Neill wrote in The Times with an interview with Maeve's Mother by Dr David Tuller.

https://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/my-daughter-couldnt-be-sa...

https://www.codastory.com/waronscience/chronic-fatigue-syndr...

quenched commented on Why do ships use “port” and “starboard” instead of “left” and “right?” oceanservice.noaa.gov/fac... · Posted by u/snitzr

wpietri · 3 years ago

Concision is way less important than clarity.

quenched · 3 years ago

Eg if you're trying to shout over the wind.

quenched commented on Why do ships use “port” and “starboard” instead of “left” and “right?” oceanservice.noaa.gov/fac... · Posted by u/snitzr

binarymax · 3 years ago

Because left and right are ambiguous - are you talking about MY left or the boat’s left? Having unambiguous names let’s us differentiate and avoid confusion.

It might be hard to grok the need for this if you’ve never been in a tight spot while sailing or operating a watercraft with a crew - but having this distinction has probably saved thousands of bad incidents from happening.

quenched · 3 years ago

There's a similar issue in medical imaging, when oriented with the patient "facing you". Then my left is patient right and vice versa.

This is why in the days of processed x-ray films, TV shows would more commonly hang a chest x-ray incorrectly[1], with the (patient's) "left" label on the left instead of the right. It's less common now that the example imaging is digital.

[1] https://screenrant.com/scrubs-xray-gag-joke-deeper-meaning/