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Comment by londons_explore | Hacker News Reader

One potential mechanism for fatigue:

* Virus' have a high failure rate - many infected cells never go on to multiply.

* However, those infected cells may also not still perform correctly.

* If you have a good chunk of your cells in your body no longer performing their function, yet not dying and making way for replacements either, everything isn't going to work as well.

That would explain why it is a wide range of viruses that can all cause fatigue symptoms, and also why parasitic and bacterial infections rarely cause the same.

Technical term: Virus-induced senescence

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Better potential mechanism:

* person gets infected

* enyzmes needed to fight infection are used more

* these enzymes need cofactors like manganese, zinc and iron

* Patient becomes depleted in Manganese, zinc and iron.

* since these cofactors are needed to control oxidative stress in the mitochondria there is more oxidative stress in the mitochondria

* fatigue

https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1016/j.cdtm.2020.11.0...

That seems like a plausible hypthosis, but hard to test for.

In this hypothesis, what would be a solution?

Best I can think of is Chemo-therapy, to kill of the bad cells. But that feels incredibly heavy handed, as well as liable to do more damage.

Probably not a solution, but many people have reported benefits from fasting, which increases cellular autophagy which degrades disfunctional cell parts - and might play a role in programmed cell death, though the relationship is not clear.

Intermittent fasting could work.

And time.

Two sibling comments mentioned fasting. Adding more to that.

Prolonged fasting is known to clear away senescent cells. So that is the intervention which seems most promising here. Intermittent fasting can help the gut by giving it time to rest between meals, and it can improve insulin sensitivity because the body spends more time in a low insulin state. Maybe there are longer chains of mechanism there, but at first glance, they don't seem quite as relevant.

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