The brain affected by chronic fatigue syndrome

CHRONIC FATIGUE SYNDROME: WHAT IS ITS RELATION TO THE HUMAN BRAIN?

Fatigue is quite a common feeling that people are often found to experience, especially after long days at work or after getting completely stressed out. Though feeling exhausted and fatigued after strenuous activities is quite normal, many people are found to get fatigued very frequently and this is where lies the health abnormality. This is a health condition, characterized by high levels of fatigue and other health issues, due to which the body lacks enough energy and suffers from various types of health disorders. Chronic fatigue syndrome is a condition that is known to affect your brain functioning. Developing chronic fatigue syndrome can damage the parts of the brain that are related to perceiving fatigue and encouraging effort because when you have chronic fatigue syndrome, these centers of the brain, that is, the right temporal-parietal area of the brain will not be able to function properly.

This article will help you to get a detailed overview of what chronic fatigue syndrome is all about, the causes and symptoms that are a part of this disease, and most importantly, how this disease can affect your brain cells. Read the article till the end and know how chronic fatigue syndrome can affect your brain conditions and what you can do about it.

Chronic fatigue syndrome: What is this disease all about?

Chronic fatigue syndrome is a condition that is characterized by a set of symptoms such as improper brain functioning, resulting in memory loss, lack of focusing abilities, cognitive problems, and so on. It is a condition that is similar to myalgic encephalomyelitis/chronic fatigue syndrome (ME/CFS). Chronic fatigue syndrome is also often considered by experts as myalgic encephalomyelitis (ME) or systemic exertion intolerance disease (SEID). hronic fatigue syndrome or CFS is a condition as a result of which a person can feel extreme fatigue and exhaustion for quite a long time and this can result in problems in your overall well-being. If you feel that you have chronic fatigue syndrome you are more likely to suffer from intense fatigue for at least six months or more than that and these feelings of exhaustion and tiredness do not go away with simply resting or sleeping more (especially when the condition gets chronic). The continuous fatigue and extreme exhaustion of chronic fatigue syndrome cannot be explained by any kind of underlying medical condition of a person and makes the person feel sick and tired throughout the day.

What can happen to you if you have chronic fatigue syndrome?

When a person develops chronic fatigue syndrome, there are chances that the person might suffer from a lot of health complications other than continuous and unexplained fatigue. Apart from being tired, the person might start having several other types of health issues, such as headaches, muscle pain, lack of proper sleep, loss of memory, and so on. Conditions of sleeplessness become one of the determining issues of chronic fatigue syndrome, as people suffering from this disease usually suffer from chronic insomnia, developing a feeling that you feel unrefreshed in the morning after a night’s sleep, along with many other sleep-related issues. Lack of proper sleep will invariably produce issues related to memory problems such as loss of memory, there is no proper ability to focus and concentrate on a matter, conditions of orthostatic intolerance, and so on.

Moreover, such conditions not only occur for a mere number of days but can continue for months. This is, therefore, a new state of tiredness and exhaustion for the person which makes him/her feel almost drained out for a long time. This is what is commonly termed as a condition, known as chronic fatigue syndrome.

Causes and symptoms of chronic fatigue syndrome:

Before understanding how chronic fatigue syndrome can affect you, it is very important to understand what are the conditions that result in the occurrence of this type of chronic disease and how you would be able to identify the significant markers of this disease.

The factors that result in the occurrences of chronic fatigue syndrome are not quite simple and these factors keep varying from one person to the other. The exact cause behind the occurrence of chronic fatigue syndrome is not known yet. In fact, there is no single or absolute cause that is responsible for chronic fatigue syndrome to develop. There can be multiple factors that can lead to this chronic disease of exhaustion. Some experts are found to claim that chronic fatigue syndrome develops as a result of various conditions such as high levels of psychological stress and anxiety, infections caused by viruses, or other conditions (the causes can be a combination of all these factors as well). When chronic fatigue syndrome develops as a result of infections from viruses, it is important to note that the following types of viruses may lead to the development of this disease:

• Ross River virus or RRV

• Rubella virus

• Epstein Bar Virus or EBV

• Human herpesvirus 6.

Apart from viruses, bacterial infections too can result in the occurrence of chronic fatigue syndrome, out of which bacteria like Mycoplasma pneumoniae and Coxiella burnetii are some of the most common ones.

Many doctors thus claim that as this disease is caused by several reasons, it therefore becomes quite difficult to diagnose and treat chronic fatigue syndrome. Yet there are some commonly identified causes for chronic fatigue syndrome, some of which include the following:

• High levels of stress

• Viral infections

• A weak immune response system

• Imbalances in hormonal secretion.

Apart from these common factors, there are other conditions as well, that can result in the occurrences of chronic fatigue syndrome, one of which is the genetic condition. When there is the presence of a gene that carries traits of chronic fatigue syndrome among your close family members, there will be a possibility for you to develop this disease sometime later in life and this is the reason why many people often become genetically predisposed to develop chronic fatigue syndrome.

The evident physical symptoms of chronic fatigue syndrome:

The symptoms of chronic fatigue syndrome, just like the causes, are also found to differ from one person to another and thus the common and generally-occurring symptoms are looked for so that it becomes easier for you to understand from the symptoms whether you have developed chronic fatigue syndrome. Some of those symptoms include the following:

• Headaches that occur frequently

• Lymph glands in the neck and armpit become tender and swollen

• Sore throat occurs frequently

• Muscle

• Multi-joint pain without redness or swelling.

The diagnosis: Chronic fatigue syndrome and its connection to the brain damage

Since the exact causes and symptoms of chronic fatigue syndrome are not known to all experts, the diagnosis of the disease becomes very difficult and due to this there are no such specific tests for chronic fatigue syndrome. To treat and diagnose chronic fatigue syndrome, experts mostly rule out other causes of your fatigue to understand whether you have truly developed this disease. Moreover, people who develop chronic fatigue syndrome can have underlying abnormalities in many parts of the body and one of the most crucial areas is the brain (there can be many other areas as well, such as the blood vessels, the immune system, the microbiome, the healthy bacteria that are found in the gut, and so on). the bacteria that live in the gut.

Many experts claim that the presence of conditions like chronic fatigue syndrome can result in certain types of abnormalities in your brain and within the spinal fluids (the fluid that surrounds the brain and reflects the biochemical functioning of the brain), the levels of various brain chemicals that are known as neurotransmitters and markers of inflammation can become different when a person has chronic fatigue syndrome that in a healthy and normal person.

Does chronic fatigue syndrome remain mostly inside the human brain?

Now that you know about chronic fatigue syndrome, this is the most common question that might occur in one’s mind. However, it is important to note that chronic fatigue syndrome is such a type of disorder of the brain, which might have been developed by chronic immune activation and changes in the gut microbiome. The brain is connected to chronic fatigue syndrome because experts claim that the abnormalities involving the brain, chronic activation (and exhaustion) of the immune system, alterations in the gut microbiome, and viral infections are all linked.