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Comment by gadders | Hacker News Reader

Long COVID is similar to ME in that the cause is likely psychiatric (although real to the sufferer) rather than physical.

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC8870488/

"Conclusions: Our study shows higher levels of neuroticism in patients with post-COVID syndrome."

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Higher neuroticism? I am a psychologist and this means nothing.

This "believes" were entertained for a long time about ME but we have enough scientifical evidence that they were false.

Historically, this happened with multiple sclerosis, people with ms were labelled as fakers and ms was called "faker's disease".

Let's not go again to those horrible times today.

For an ample literature about ME I Invite you to visit the open medicine foundation website (the centre that studies ME at Stanford).

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3643988/p

"Higher emotional instability was associated with both definitions of chronic fatigue and was confounded by shared genetics."

Of course, this theory is very unpopular with sufferers of ME such as yourself.

> Of course, this theory is very unpopular with sufferers of ME such as yourself.

This is an unnecessary ad hominem.

> https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3643988

Unlike your first source, this one does not even attempt to quantify what percentage of the variation in ME is explained by genetics. This only says that genetics plays a role. You need strong evidence to credibly state a monocausal explanation for something like ME.

The reality is that different biomarkers were discovered through the years by the Stanford centre by we are still looking for a specific biomarker to ME.

For example one of the criteria to diagnose ME is to have Pots, which is a disease with very specific symptoms.

Pots is a disfunction of the autonomic system and it is often associated with gastroparesis.

I repeat, you are endorsing a very obsolete theory about ME.

I think you're reading more into this study than the study itself says.

"Conclusions: Our study shows higher levels of neuroticism in patients with post-COVID syndrome" does not imply that "long COVID ... is likely psychiatric."

I'm an engineer, not a social scientist, but to my eye this study doesn't determine the direction of causality. It certainly seems plausible to me that a chronic illness could cause the neuroticism they measured, rather than vice-versa.

Further, the authors themselves seem to imply that there are non-psychiatric symptoms of long COVID: "Secondly, we evaluated the correlation between the main personality traits and the neuropsychiatric features of post-COVID syndrome" suggests that there may be non-neuropsychiatric features.

I think that, as unsatisfying as the prospect is, it's just going to take more time and work for humanity to really understand this virus -- including the nature of long COVID.

As an aside, this article from 2019 [0] suggests that ME is not (or at least not purely) a psychiatric illness.

"The US Institute of Medicine (IOM) in 2015 conducted an extensive review of the literature, including expert testimonies from the most prominent US ME/CFS experts and concluded that ME/CFS is a ‘serious biological illness’. Similarly, the US National Institutes of Health (NIH) concluded that ME/CFS is ‘not a primary psychological disease’ (Green et al., 2015)." [0]

[0] Geraghty et al., "The ‘cognitive behavioural model’ of chronic fatigue syndrome: Critique of a flawed model." https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6482658/

Are you saying that if neuroticism is a cause then neuroticism is the only cause? I’m not an expert but it seems that the causes are pretty much unknown:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chronic_fatigue_syndrome#Cause

If you had to guess, would you say the editors of that page are more or less likely to have ME?

Even if that's the case, the source that you have cited does not say that ME is caused only by the patients' psychology. From the abstract of your source:

  Personality scores explained 36.3% and 41% of the variance in scores on the anxiety and depression scales, respectively.

This means that 63.7 percent of the variation in anxiety and 59 percent of the variation in depression are not explained by neuroticism or any of the other four of the Big Five personality traits. This is a very far cry from what you are claiming which is that ME is rooted purely in psychology.

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