Chronic Fatigue Syndrome and Nervous System Involvement :: Chronic Fatigue Syndrome Medical Essays

Chronic Fatigue Syndrome and Nervous System Involvement Upon concluding my neurobiology course, I spent some time reflecting on what I've learned about the nervous system and its functions. I thought about how much progress has been made in the last couple of decades alone in defining and understanding certain aspects of neuronal functions, and must admit that I am very impressed. However, there is still so much we don't know about this area, and nowhere has this notion proved more true than in my exploration of Chronic Fatigue Syndrome. As will soon be clear, this disease is highly debilitating and can greatly lower the quality of an individual's life, yet to date there are no definite findings about the etiology of this illness. But even more importantly, this illness shows the importance of understanding and being able to assess the different workings of our nervous system and its complex nature. Unfortunately, the study of this same disease also shows the human inability to yet do so. So what is Chronic Fatigue Syndrome, or CFS? I would like to be able to explain exactly what CFS is, but true to the nature of what is known about this illness, there is no precise way to describe CFS. Rather, the disease is identified through a number of symptoms (both physical and psychological), including unexplained and persistent fatigue of new or definite onset, concurrent with short-term memory loss, sore throat, tender axillary lymph nodes, muscle pain and unrefreshing sleep, among a number of others, for a duration of at least six months. As is probably evident, the above symptoms, in addition to being signs of CFS, are also the same (or very similar) symptoms experienced in such diseases as Lymes disease and "the flu." There are symptoms that involve the Gastrointestinal Tract (GI), immunological-related symptoms, symptoms of psychiatric disease like depression, sexual malfunction, endocrine dysfunction-basically every system in the body. This is part of the reason why CFS is hard to detect, and is usually chosen as a diagnosis only at the exclusion of all other possible ailments. The other difficulty that lies with diagnosing CFS is that there is no way of measuring the level of a person's fatigue-there is no way for a physician to tell whether a patient complaining of fatigue is experiencing the type of fatigue associated with CFS or he/she is just extremely tired and overworked.