Anonymous
Not logged in
Talk
Contributions
Create account
Log in
Search
Editing
Corticosteroids given during acute viral infection may trigger myalgic encephalomyelitis
(section)
From MEpedia, a crowd-sourced encyclopedia of ME and CFS science and history
Namespaces
Page
Discussion
More
More
Page actions
Read
Edit
Edit source
History
Warning:
You are not logged in. Your IP address will be publicly visible if you make any edits. If you
log in
or
create an account
, your edits will be attributed to your username, along with other benefits.
Anti-spam check. Do
not
fill this in!
==Acute viral infection plus corticosteroids may cause ME/CFS == [[John Chia|Dr John Chia]] has observed that corticosteroids inadvertently prescribed during an acute viral infection substantially increase the risk of developing myalgic encephalomyelitis / chronic fatigue syndrome (ME/CFS) from that infection. Via his meticulous investigations into patients' medical histories, Dr Chia discovered that hundreds of his ME/CFS patients were given corticosteroids precisely during the time that they came down with a flu-like illness, gastrointestinal upset or other viral infection.<ref>{{Cite web | url = http://www.investinme.org/IIMEC5.shtml | title = Dr John Chia: Enterovirus Infection in ME/CFS. Presentation at the Invest in ME International ME Conference, London 2010 (available on DVD). Timecodes: 07:31 and 28:00. | last = | first = | authorlink = | date = | website = | archive-url = | archive-date = |url-status = | access-date=|quote=VIDEO TIMECODE 07:31 — If the patient already had chickenpox before and they then develop flu-like illness with chickenpox-like rashes that's enterovirus until proven otherwise. But the rash could look like measles, German measles, it could look like hives. So very often people travel, eat some shellfish, and develop this hives, all over. Went to the emergency room, the emergency room doctor will say, 'Oh well, you ate lobster, you must be allergic to shellfish.' So what's the next thing they get? They get some prednisone, steroids, and that disease never ended. They develop chronic fatigue syndrome after that. We hear this hundreds of times. VIDEO TIMECODE 28:00 — Glucocorticoids: if the patient developed a viral infection, and with symptoms suggestive of asthma, they are often given steroids, because it's the mainstay of therapy. That can shift the immune response to Th2, not to mention you'll drop the T-lymphocytes down to practically zero.}}</ref> Thus there appears to be a causal equation of: '''Acute infection + corticosteroids = ME/CFS''' Dr Chia says one reason corticosteroids can be inadvertently prescribed during an acute enteroviral infection is because an [[enterovirus]] rash can look like [[Urticaria|hives]], so if a doctor questions what the patient ate, and they happened to eat shellfish recently, the doctor may incorrectly assume the rash is a hives rash, resulting from allergy to shellfish. So the doctor may then put the patient on a course of corticosteroids such as prednisone, as this is the normal treatment for hives. Thus the patient has an acute enterovirus infection, and needs a strong immune response to fight this infection, yet receives immunosuppressing corticosteroids, because the viral rash was misdiagnosed as hives. Similarly, if a patient comes down with an acute viral infection and its symptoms are suggestive of asthma, they may also be inappropriately prescribed corticosteroids, because that is how [[asthma]] is treated.
Summary:
Please make sure your edits are consistent with
MEpedia's guidelines
.
By saving changes, you agree to the
Terms of use
, and you irrevocably agree to release your contribution under the
CC BY-SA 3.0 License
and the
GFDL
. You agree that a hyperlink or URL is sufficient attribution under the Creative Commons license.
Cancel
Editing help
(opens in new window)
This page is a member of 3 hidden categories:
Category:All articles needing cleanup from 2019
Category:Articles needing cleanup from 2019
Category:Cleanup tagged articles with a reason field from 2019
Navigation
Navigation
Skip to content
Main page
Browse
Become an editor
Random page
Popular pages
Abbreviations
Glossary
About MEpedia
Links for editors
Contents
Guidelines
Recent changes
Pages in need
Search
Help
Wiki tools
Wiki tools
Special pages
Page tools
Page tools
User page tools
More
What links here
Related changes
Page information
Page logs