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It's official ...!
Here is some news that will go a long way to diminishing the guilt and frustration people with fibromyalgia and CFS so often feel about exercise.
by Moira Smith (1988)
Recent research by the Adelaide CFS Research Group on lactic acid in people with CFS and fibromyalgia has had quite a bit of publicity. They think they have found a possible diagnostic test for CFS! I was at the talk by Professor Garry Scroop and his colleague Dr Richard Burnet put on by the ACT ME/CFS Society in October 1998 in Canberra.
Lactic acid is a toxic by-product of exercise - it is what makes your muscles tired. Basically what Dr Scroop has found is that, while it is normal for lactic acid to be released into the blood stream during exercise, people with CFS release about twice as much as “normal healthy” people.
The blood samples are taken from Dr Scroop’s subjects while they are riding an exercise bike for ten minutes. The results have been very consistent and prove that there is a physical abnormality involved, but there is still a lot of work to be done.
Some people who have heard about this have asked if they can get treatment of some kind to lower their lactic acid. Dr Scroop says, although there is certainly some problem in the way our muscles produce energy, he doesn’t think the answer is that simple. And remember the high lactic acid he has found is only a by-product of much more vigorous exercise than we normally do - yet we are still tired!
Others have noted that trained athletes can exercise for longer than “normal healthy people” before their lactic acid levels start to rise. This is one of the objectives of training. So could our problem be that we start producing lactic acid much too quickly - and could training fix this? The answer again is “no”. Dr Scroop’s experiments show that when we exercise we start to release lactic acid at the same time as the “normal healthy people” he was using as comparisons. We are already as fit as they are! It is only the amount of lactic acid we produce that is abnormal. During his lecture he insisted that asking people with CFS or fibromyalgia to do aerobic training (like riding an exercise bike or power walking) is completely pointless.
From the Canberra Fibromyalgia Self-Help Group's "Fibromyalgia News" (a supplement to the quarterly newsletter of the Arthritis Foundation of the ACT) Summer 1998-99
See also:
Exercise
a health risk for chronic fatigue sufferers - ABC news, 8 August 2001
"... a study conducted by Adelaide University's Exercise and Physiology Research Unit
has found chronic fatigue patients have the same fitness level as the average healthy
person.
Associate Professor Garry Scroop says exercise can make their condition worse. ... The
research team hopes its findings will encourage doctors not to prescribe exercise for
chronic fatigue patients."
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last revised 15 December 2001