Vagus nerve infection hypothesis
From MEpedia, a crowd-sourced encyclopedia of ME and CFS science and history
The vagus nerve hypothesis proposes that the symptoms of Chronic Fatigue Syndrome are caused by an infection of the vagus nerve.
In 2013, Michael Van Elzakker, a postdoctoral researcher at Harvard Medical School, published the hypothesis.[1]
The vagus nerve is for the sickness response.
Van Elzakker believes that any infectious agent with an affinity for nerve tissues can cause a vagus nerve infection, including HHV-6, Epstein-Barr, herpes zoster virus, chicken pox, certain kinds of enteroviruses and even borrelia, the bacterium the causes Lyme disease. He thinks this could explain why no single infective agent has been isolated as the cause of CFS, even though all of these agents have been associated with disease.[2]
