I'm Jarred Younger, PhD and my full time job is to figure out fibromyalgia, ME/CFS, Gulf War Illness, Long-COVID, and other chronic pain and fatigue conditions. I use neuroimaging, clinical trial, and immune modulatory techniques to create new treatments and diagnostics.
I am posting a video every week to keep everyone up to date on my lab's work and important news from other research groups. I hope you are able to follow along the research journey.
Bless you for your work. It seems to me that you are validating MCS Multiple Chemical Sensitivity as being real. I've heard you mention GWI which Alison Johnson equates to MCS. ME/CFS is in the same basket of chronic illnesses.
In case you don't saw this presentation from Professor Alain Moreau, I thing you will like it. ru-vid.com/video/%D0%B2%D0%B8%D0%B4%D0%B5%D0%BE-dWeKObi1o1o.html Thank you so much Dr. Younger, for all work you and your team are doing!
You could easily implant a subcutaneous device. Saying you’d have to walk around with leads hanging out and risk infection doesn’t fly! I respect your work and skill but if you really believe there’s no known way to do this then I say BS! Think shunt system like used for pseudo Tumor cerebri. Catheters into the brain, MAGNETIC shunt valve under the skin on the skull then the drain to peritoneal area or coratic artery . I’ve a pacemaker defibrillator same concept. If the stimuli you say actually works and has for years I’m disgusted that it hasn’t been done. I would know what I’m saying because I helped develop the first pediatric magnetic shunt with a ruby seat for pediatric children. My stepson was the first to recipient. This was in early 2000 made by Saint Goblain in Garden Grove California.So the knowledge to avoid exterior issues have and do exist and many people are deceased unnecessarily.
My son has pseudo tumer Cerebra. He has a magnetic shunt in his body. I have Heart failure and a pacemaker defribulator. That being said and excuse me for being assumptive but I don’t accept that you can’t put the leads in where needed and run them subcutaneously to an adjustable battery operated and adjustable implant device . This could save many lives! So I find it hard to believe that this knowledge has existed all these years and this has not been done.
Good question. We haven't run the weather/pollution analyses on healthy controls. The healthy individuals don't generally have much variance in their fatigue and pain from day to day, so it is hard for any statistical tests to be positive. But you're right it is wise to test the healthy individuals as well to make sure. We have daily data on about 30 healthy individuals and could pull the weather and pollution data for them to see if there are any effects. Thanks! - Jarred Younger
Hello from Taiwan, where we experience a lot of humidity and very bad air quality regularly from our neighbors in the big land next door. I've had many days when the air quality index hits 150+ and my body tells me before our Air Quality Index meter does. I purchased a Dyson Air Purifier for my room during the pandemic and it is working well. I'm shocked by the readings on it being consistent with what the index is telling me, and I'm shocked at what it pulls out of my bedroom. Yes we replace that filter once a year and we rely on it heavily. We liked our first purchase so much, we're saving for a second one for the front part of our home. Thanks so much for a great informative video!
I don't know how easy it is to monitor fragrances and similar compounds. I don‘t react to everything with an odor, but typical air freshener, cleaning supplies, shampoos etc. drive me up the wall. I've gotten really sick from two different floors (after ripping them out I got better) and once from paints used on radiators (when the heating was on they gave off a strong smell). And of course mold sets me off real fast…
That is an interesting point. Given the chemical sensitivities in ME/CFS, including fragrances, it would be interesting to see if the monitors are sensitive to those compounds. I don't know the size of most odorous or fragrant compounds. I think I'll test my monitors with fragrance sprayed in the air, on skin, and on fabric to see if they are detected. - Jarred Younger
Trigger warning: tinfoil hat stuff. I spent the past 18 months tracking so-called space weather and my symptoms. I have begrudgingly had to accept that I react quite strongly to socalled space weather events, most notably fluctuations in Earth's magnetic field. Most notably digestion, cognitive/psychological and fatigue. I suspect I'm not the only one who resists accepting this conclusion. However: It's reasonably easy to test out for yourself by installing an app like SpaceWeatherLive and looking for outliers on the Kp index. (I have severe ME/CFS)
Wouldn't High and low pressure systems also be driven by electromagnetic shifts? I wonder at the mechanisms. I react to pressure drops which likely trigger mold spore release..
I’m quite a scientifically minded person, and I’ve discounted this link before, but I have to admit that my flares were horrendous during the large solar flares earlier this year (before I knew of a potential link there). Google scholar returns one paper showing a significant relationship between solar flares and neurological symptom severity, I’m not sure it’s necessarily been studied - presumably because we can’t really do much about it.
Again, I can't express my gratitude for all of the splendid science you are doing, Dr. Younger. Tangentially related: I got an Aranet4 a couple of weeks ago, and have been keeping it with me 24/7. I've discovered that CO2 regularly gets up around 1500 ppm in rooms in my house (like my home office, which is a small 2nd floor bedroom). I wonder if there is a relationship between CO2 levels and fatigue. Anyway, I'd gladly sign up for your study of microenviorments. I'd even buy the indoor air quality meter. Heck, maybe I should get one anyway. Budget ones seem to be iffy, though.
I hope the device is helpful! C02 can definitely cause fatigue. Levels of 2000ppm are known to cause fatigue and cognitive issues among the general population. If a room has no circulation, and a person converting oxygen to C02, then the C02 levels will (slowly) rise. There may be some RU-vid videos where cheaper devices are contrasted with research-quality devices, but I don't have a go-to trusted source for that topic. - Jarred Younger
@youngerlab I've had mild to moderate CFS for 34 years, and a covid infection in May 2022 made it so much worse, I'm highly motivated to try things like this.
Several studies show LDN isn't effective in fibro (including 2 RCTs from The Lancet and PAIN Reports in 2024 and 2023), I don't understand where the 50% response rate you mentioned comes from. Most people I know from Facebook groups who tried LDN for pain didn't have any type of success... I was thrilled after watching your Green Light Therapy video, but this video is a bit baffling, tbh.
Bad air quality does indeed set my brain on fire (Long covid, MCAS). My doctor was gaslighting me about it just yesterday. Thank you Dr. Younger for being a voice of reason.
@@kimberlykramer334 Absolutely. Proper ventilation at home made a night and day difference in my MCAS symptoms. Now I can't stay a minute in a room with CO2 above 1000ppm.
Start using vibrant wellness to test people for lyme. Old school lyme testing is AWEFUL and almost always gives a false negative. Ochratoxin A from aspergillus is found in every regressive autistic kid.
Yes! There are so many new testing methods that detects it including Genius scans, bioscans, and others. They are very accurate. I believe the old Lyme blood test was created to give false negatives.
It's lyme and fungal mycotoxins. Ochratoxin A from aspergillus turns off your immune system. Vomitoxin from Fusarium causes all sorts of intestinal issues. It's compounding toxin load on the mitochondria breaking the backup mechanism. Lyme testing is AWEFUL. Use vibrant wellness to test for Lyme.
Slightly off subject, but Jarred you will find this interesting. I see there’s recent findings in Alzheimers research that by chance used IDO1 inhibitors to get ‘astrocytes’ glucose metabolism working again. As you’ll remember that Ron Davis and his co researcher Ron suspected the gene for IDO1 was defective in ME/CFS. But didn’t have funding to test medications on it. Article published by: ‘PenState’ Article name: >>> Cancer drug could treat early-stage Alzheimer’s disease, study shows <<< Excerpt: >>> “researchers demonstrated that stopping IDO1 helps restore healthy glucose metabolism in astrocytes, the star-shaped brain cells that provide metabolic support to neurons” <<<<< I had to look up ‘astrocytes’ and it turns out they have several functions, including biochemical control of endothelial cells that form the blood-brain barrier. The very thing you are suspicious is possibly faulty in ME/CFS, which in turn if the BBB is being breached by things that shouldn’t enter the brain, then the microglial cells would become activated and aggravated, which in turn would see the brain and body hunker down in its sickness state (‘Cell Defence Response’ CDR), and loop back to reduced glucose metabolism in all cells probably via IDO1. Maybe it’s a vicious feedback loop is happening Robert Naviaux’s work on the Cell Danger Response explains that too. in which many if not all cell types reduce dramatically in their glucose metabolism. Or enough to cause issues with ATP production. Anyway IDO1 inhibitors (which I didn’t know existed) now look like a possible way of reversing reduced glucose production. And may halt the feedback loop. Waking up cells to do their jobs. Which would then allow microglial cells to finally get some rest! What are your thoughts?
Thank you.As a patient, I have multiple HEPA air filters in my house and have also spent time in Hawaii and neither resolve my MECFS issues, so I hope you don’t spend too much effort on digging into this further- instead please look for cures. Thank you!
Thank you.As a patient, I have multiple HEPA air filters in my house and have also spent time in Hawaii and neither resolve my MECFS issues, so I hope you don’t spend too much effort on digging into this further- instead please look for cures. Thank you!
Just a note, HEPA is rated for the number of particles it captures equal to 0.3 um in diameter, but this is not the lower limit of its effective range. Wikipedia says it is actually even more effective at some smaller particle sizes. "filtration efficiency increasing for particle diameters both less than and greater than 0.3 μm"
Good point. I found it impossible to find convincing data on HEPA filters blocking influenza (for example) in real-world situations when I checked a few years ago, but the literature may be more substantial now because of SARS-CoV-2. I agree that most respiratory viruses should be blocked to a substantial degree, especially when taking into account the size of the droplets containing the viri. Thanks! - Jarred Younger
I think the paper should control for the temperature and other weather variables in the days preceding the symptom metric. A nice hot day might have people with ME/CFS getting outside and getting some steps or other activity, which might lead to fatigue in the following days. Maybe it'd be good to control for something like the hottest temperature in the three days preceding the symptom recording.
Yes that sounds like a good potential confound to manage. This analysis didn't examine any time-lagged effects. We have all the information to do those analyses. It just requires a more complex model with time-varying factors, but I'm comfortable running those. I agree that approach could give us better models. - Jarred Younger
@@youngerlab Thanks, glad you'll consider doing that. Any chance you plan to release the raw data, maybe on mapmecfs? I think that's a very valuable practice in case people come up with novel ways to analyze the data after publishing.
@@youngerlab oh also if there is an association between air quality and symptoms, I think there's a good chance that it will be stronger delayed by at least one day, maybe longer. Whether through some kind of PEM mechanism where it takes energy to deal with the particles, or just it taking some time for symptoms to outwardly appear after damage.
This has been clear for me, I have a very hard time even just from the air inside the house when cooking on the stove, esp when something burns or grills. Puts me in immediate pain.
A personal purifier with true HEPA filters should handle it, as long as there isn't something else in the room that is constantly generating more pollutants. But just a good central air system with good filters should be able to handle the pollutants in most cases. - Jarred Younger
So many heat advisories this summer. Heat is a hard one for us to analyze in this study because most people probably already know if they have a problem with heat and they avoid it at all costs. I'm guessing that is why I didn't see a relationship between heat and ME/CFS severity. - Jarred Younger
Great that your doing this! I hope you get more funding. Lots of variables that will be hard to account for. My thinking #1 would be if the participants live in a moldy house. Also just as with PEM effects might have a lag time. Just like getting out of a moldy house has a lag time. Part of the reason so many people don't recognize it as being the #1 most significant driver of their symptoms. I would like to see a simple study which did the expensive mold tests and than rated the correlation it has to people with cfs and their severity. I suspect a lot of people with CFS are in denial to the issue of mold for a lot of different reasons. Once they make the connection though it is always going to be a #1 concern for them from that point on. It took me two years of denial before I finally acknowledged to my self my house was making me sick. It's not easy to move and even if you do you might be jumping from one frying pan to another. Finding a house with air quality a moldie can tolerate is a very difficult prospect. I never did, and I tried close to a dozen different places and situations. why I live in a metal building where I have full control over water damaged and organic material and their emissions. And I while I am much much much better than I was in that moldie home of mine I am still far from being cured or living anywhere near to a normal level of health.
One more note many people with MCS are in my opinion very sensitized to mold also. So when you screen for participants you would want to ask them if they are sensitized to chemicals or mold and on a level of 1 to 10 how sensitive they are.
Mold spores are very problematic. "Black mold" spores cause many respiratory problems. And when I lived in Arizona, the Valley fever caused by spores was a great concern because it can mimic other diseases like rheumatoid arthritis. There are some reasonably priced home mold kits that could be included in a study. - Jarred Younger
This is something as patients we know to be true, but glad to see a researcher finally properly studying this subject. However, I disagree with your conclusion that the problem is mediated by inflammation. Inflammation is a protective mechanism, and the PM triggers pain because the PM in of itself is toxic. Additionally, this study on considers that pollution only exacerbates symptoms, rather than being at root cause, so there's a long way to go. Proper studies need to be done to assess mold exposure, VOC exposure, as well as nanoparticles (UFPs), particularly from matte white paint which can be the root cause for weakness and pain syndromes.
Thank you for this information. Very interesting stuff. I live in the UK near a major airport and I’d be interested in any future study on this. I hope you’re feeling better cos you still sound a bit snuffly to me 😊
Heat, & especially humidity, hugely affect me negatively. Thankfully, where I live on a farm in rural Australia our air quality is usually very good, although pollen & dust can be a problem sometimes, especially when windy, & smoke from bushfires when they occur nearby is obviously awful. The next place further south is Antarctica. Certain weather can definitely make me feel worse. 🇦🇺 How can I measure the air quality where I live? HUGE thanks for all that you do. It is very much appreciated. Had ME for 29 years, & deteriorated a lot over the last 8 years.
Being in the countryside generally means you have a different air pollution, not you don't have air pollution. The pollution that you are exposed to is the invisible to the naked eye stuff. This is why we often confuse, no visible pollution, with no pollution or very good air quality. Ozone is the most common culprit for triggering health issues in rural areas amongst the population sensitive to poor air quality. What makes things even more complicated, is that ozone alone isn't really that bad, it's when the ozone is high and other pollutants interact with it, that's when things can get really bad. It's as though the interactions going on in the air, put the air in a state of oxidative stress, which has the effect of putting our cells in a state of oxidative stress, because our body just can't find the correct balance to regulate the oxidative process.
This is interesting. Certainly I have long felt the relationships between weather, bad air, fatigue, and pain, but I have a history that includes allergies, multiple bouts of pneumonia, and a period of pretty severe asthma that hit me after multiple years picking up new instances of the aforementioned pneumonia. Happily, vaccines work, given reasonable efforts to avoid needless infection (something people seem to forget regarding Covid-19), so I have left pneumonia in my past. My sense was that my history and ongoing allergy issues make me very aware of my lung function, so I thought maybe I was placing too much weight on the contribution of air and weather to my fatigue (and, to a lesser extent, pain - my core, visceral pain is very specifically what it is, though my recent neuropathy seems more dependent on environmental conditions). As it turns out, at least from the preliminary result, I may have been noticing what is actually happening. We are trained by clinicians to mistrust, very often, our own senses of what drives our symptoms (and, in the case of pain, to doubt the validity of our symptoms - a yet-more-pernicious thing). Staying on an even keel while handling the illness, our thoughts and feelings about the illness(es), and the senses of what we should or should not be doing or thinking coming from friends, relatives, and healthcare professionals - each with different priorities and preconceptions - is not so easy, with the result that sick people (especially thoughtful ones willing to entertain different perspectives) will find themselves questioning observations healthy people would never have reason to doubt.
Is there any chance of testing high vitamin d3 and k2 plus the other co factors that Dr Eric berg says to take in his RU-vid videos, please 🙏 for M.E.CFS and insomnia
ME and CFS both have an inflammatory component, therefore air pollution affects them. This can be applied to every single health issue that has an inflammatory component.
