Brian Walitt

Brian Walitt, M.D., M.P.H. is a researcher in the Division of Intramural Research within the National Center for Complementary and Integrative Health at the National Institutes of Health (NIH) in the United States and oversees intramural clinical protocols. He is the lead clinical investigator of the NIH Post-Infectious ME/CFS Study.

Research

Dr. Walitt's research interests include "pain and related interoceptive disorders (i.e. fibromyalgia, chronic fatigue)" and "social construction of illness and disease."

He is interested in studying "perceptual illness" which he defines as follows:

"In these disorders, a person experiences a range of different bodily sensations, such as pain and fatigue, without any clear external cause. In some, these sensations can be bothersome while in others they can be disabling. The perceptual illnesses that interest me change their names with every generation, with current disorders being called fibromyalgia, chronic fatigue syndrome, and post-Lyme syndrome."

Walitt was one coauthor on a small uncontrolled study (n = 9) in 2013 exploring the relationship between genetic expression and pain catastrophizing in fibromyalgia, which used a score of 16 on the Pain Catastrophizing Scale as the threshold for determination of "high catastrophizing". That is lower than the threshold of 30 recommended by the scale's manual to indicate a "clinically relevant level of catastrophizing," and a mean score for 851 injured workers was 20.90. The high catastrophizing subgroup (n = 5) in the study averaged a pain catastrophizing score of 23.6, below the threshold recommended by the scale manual. The authors concluded that "specific physiological pathways may possibly delineate pain and catastrophizing mechanisms."

Views on Fibromyalgia and ME/CFS

Walitt stated in 2015 his belief that fibromyalgia is a "psychosomatic experience," a variant of normal, and not an abnormal disease state that should be medicalized. He stated that fibromyalgia is not a disease but rather a way of "dealing with the difficulties of just being a human.”

In a 2015 paper on chemotherapy related cognitive dysfunction co-authored by Walitt, fibromyalgia and chronic fatigue syndrome are referred to as somatoform illnesses, with their hallmark being a "...discordance between the severity of subjective experience and that of objective impairment...".

Walitt also wrote in 2013 that "Fibromyalgia is closely allied with and often indistinguishable from neurasthenia" and goes on to claim that "Time brings clarity to confusing illnesses of the past, and we now recognize that hysteria, neurasthenia, and railway spine were almost always psychogenic disorders."

Discussing the results of the NIH Post-Infectious ME/CFS study, Walitt said in 2024 that "Rather than physical exhaustion or a lack of motivation, fatigue may arise from a mismatch between what someone thinks they can achieve and what their bodies perform."

Notable studies

• 2024, Deep phenotyping of post-infectious myalgic encephalomyelitis/chronic fatigue syndrome (Full text)

• 2020, Characterization of post–exertional malaise in patients with myalgic encephalomyelitis/chronic fatigue syndrome (Full text)
• 2015, Chemobrain: A critical review and causal hypothesis of link between cytokines and epigenetic reprogramming associated with chemotherapy
• 2015, Neuroimaging of Central Sensitivity Syndromes: Key Insights from the Scientific Literature
• 2013, Increased Brain White Matter Axial Diffusivity Associated with Fatigue, Pain and Hyperalgesia in Gulf War Illness (Full Text)
• 2012, The Changing Nature of Fibromyalgia
• 2007, The effects of multidisciplinary therapy on positron emission tomography of the brain in fibromyalgia: a pilot study

Talks and interviews

• 2015, VIDEO: Fibromyalgia: Finding a new narrative (there is a transcript)

Online presence

• PubMed - Brian Walitt

Online presence

• PubMed
• Twitter
• Facebook
• LinkedIn
• NIH - Dr Brian Walitt
• Arthritis Research - Brian Walitt

See also

• NIH Post-Infectious ME/CFS Study
• Avindra Nath

Learn more

• 2009, Fibromyalgia 201
• 2012, The Changing Nature of Fibromyalgia Frederick Wolfe and Brian Walitt
• 2013, Demystifying Medicine 2013 - Pain: How It Happens and What Can Be Done?
• 2015, Prevalence of Fibromyalgia in Elderly Women
• 2016, The Psychosomatic Researcher in the NIH's Big Chronic Fatigue Syndrome (ME/CFS) Study
• 2016, NIH's initial response to comments and article on Walitt
• 2016, Brian Walitt’s Radical Bias: Disorders of Subjective Perception, ME/CFS as Normal Life Experience?

See National Institutes of Health.

National Institutes of Health (NIH) - A set of biomedical research institutes operated by the U.S. government, under the auspices of the Department of Health and Human Services.

Concerning living organisms, such as cells or the human body.  Physio logical (as in physio) is not to be confused with psych ological (emotional stress).

physiological Concerning living organisms, such as cells or the human body.  Physio logical (as in physio) is not to be confused with psych ological (emotional stress).

See myalgic encephalomyelitis.

See chronic fatigue syndrome.

somatic symptom disorder A psychiatric term to describe an alleged condition whereby a person's thoughts somehow cause physical symptoms. The actual existence of such a condition is highly controversial, due to a lack of scientific evidence. It is related to other psychiatric terms, such as "psychosomatic", "neurasthenia", and "hysteria". Older terms include "somatization", "somatoform disorder", and "conversion disorder". Such terms refer to a scientifically-unsupported theory that claims that a wide range of physical symptoms can be created by the human mind, a theory which has been criticized as "mind over matter" parapsychology, a pseudoscience.

See somatic symptom disorder.

creatine (CR) - A natural substance that turns into creatine phosphate in the body, which helps make ATP. ATP provides the energy for muscles Often taken as a supplement to improve sports performance. (Learn more: www.webmd.com)