Ribose also has little to no benefit.
Rather it's a "horse to water" kind of problem where the mitochondria themselves are damaged in such a way that they refuse to uptake and manufacture energy properly no matter how many resources are present.
And all fuel types are broken, not just glucose and glycogen but fat too.
What I personally don't get after 3+ years of this is why all the broken cells have not been replaced by the body, flagged for death because of malfunction and new ones put into place even if not optimized by exercise, etc.
Something is fooling the body to keep making bad copies of bad cells because it doesn't think anything is wrong.
This is all the same with me-cfs and also similar to athletes cut down by overtraining syndrome for years if not the rest of their lives.
I had a reaction to a drug. There is now research pointing to possible mitochondrial issues. I have some symptoms on/off.
Nerves are often affected as they are very energy dependent.
The insane thing is that if I get plenty of sun, like on a summer vacation my symptoms nearly disappear. A lot of people are having good results with red light therapy and it’s something I plan on trying.
I wonder if covid long haulers would also benefit from getting plenty of sun.
The issue is far deeper and more complex than any offhand supplement or "biohack" anyone can casually ponder.
It's a core cell programming issue that is not easily resolved if even possible at all with the limit of current technology.
Many times it appears as an "energy issue" with many related diseases. Many long-covid patients also seem to spontaneously developed a new kind of diabetes which is definitely related to cell energy uptake (or rather lack of it).
And I should clarify there is more than one kind of long-covid. Some people self-resolve in months, often giving credit the last thing they took or did but really it would have happened anyway.
But in contrast here is the very careful, very detailed journal of Brandon Gilles who was a very smart person, a hacker like us, who despite all that died from covid/long-covid.
https://docs.google.com/document/d/1X3dNPgEuQ2j8x7w8OqLEDP7l...
I am in touch with physicians and many people and we discovered many things that people are trying that are mentioned in the blog. TNF-a inhibitors, anti-histamines and diets. Plus, many of the supplements listed.
I much appreciate all the work on that blog and will give it a good read at some point.
By quickly scrolling through the blog, "Energy Supplementation" section caught my attention. I already could see that the guy made a grave mistake there. Instead of meticulously compensating the activity of mitochondrial enzymes with the whole RDA spectrum of vitamins, including therapeutical quantities of B1, B3, and B7 coenzymes, he just sporadically included some stuff from here and there. Unfortunately, this is not enough to move the needle in terms of ATP yield. And without the sufficient levels of ATP, all other functions of the body go downhill. The speed of that decline is individual, sometimes it's mere months from onset to terminal. Most of the times, however, it's a multi-year struggle.
The second grave mistake is concentrating too much on secondary symptoms (inflammation, shortness of breath, blood-clotting, autoimmune) without adequately fixing the root cause (energy depletion) that caused all of them.
The third grave mistake is presented in section "Things that hurt" -> "Supplements" -> "Thiamine is a histamine liberator and DAO inhibitor", which means that the guy didn't use it at all. And this is the gravest mistake of them all. It's true that the thiamine may increase histamine levels for some individuals, but mitochondria cannot function without it, like at all. The reason for that is thiamine-activated enzymes that sit at the very start of OXPHOS pathway. Without sufficient levels of thiamine, those enzymes cannot work. As the result, nearly all parts of OXPHOS metabolic pathway become dysfunctional, lowering ATP yields even more.
(IMHO, this is what happens when a hacker incorrectly identifies a place to fix the bug and prefers to apply workarounds instead of fixing the root cause. In software, we always have a second chance, but in bioware - we may not have it at all.)
Returning to your question, the symptoms are very much like beri-beri and pellagra. The cause of death is likely to be a multi-organ failure which can be manifested either as a heart attack, hypertensive crisis, liver dysfunction, renal failure, brain damage, or a combination of those.
There’s a known link between infrared and mitochondria via the ATP cycle. I was submitted to infrared therapy for 2 months after a fracture on the cheek damaged the nerve and left my face numb. I would say I recovered 95% of the sensitivity by now, can’t prove or disprove it was definitely the treatment, but nerve damage tends to not have a great prognosis.
I only ask because I was left with CFS/ME and Small Fibre Neuropathy after a short dose of dapsone several years ago. If there's any new information about it, I'd like to hear about it.