5-year study finds no brain abnormalities in 'Havana Syndrome' patients

https://www.cbc.ca/news/world/havana-syndrome-nih-study-1.7147124

by awnird • 2 years ago

128 75 2 years ago

tokai2• 2 years ago

The symptoms sounded like burnout from the beginning. Hypochondria is a common symptom of stress, depression, and other mental disorders. A scary and confusion symptom when one does not have tendencies for it normally. There isn't one clean piece of evidence for any energy weapon or attack hypothesis. It's about time the mass hysteria surrounding Havana syndrome is laid to rest.

pessimizer2• 2 years ago

This was another hysteria that was constantly government-fueled, and discussion of it completely disappeared once the people who met every morning to whiteboard how best to push it were assigned to other projects.

pessimizer2• 2 years ago

It's very strange that the serious position is to pretend like this was an organic social phenomenon, an incident of mass psychology, and ignore the fact that it was always, as far as any science goes, a physically impossible proposition, entirely fueled by successive administrations advocating for it in every mainstream media outlet. This was another reason why Russia was a nation of comic book style evil geniuses that have to be stopped: a bond-style brain scrambling sound ray.

Any sort of lesson learned that doesn't focus on the fact that this was a fraud, not a mistake, was not a good lesson to learn. But instead of learning any lesson, people are going to just forget about it, and when reminded, still think that it really happened.

That all the comments on this page are people saying that this syndrome - that has never been any definitive trace of, caused by a mystery sound weapon which we have no physical theory of how it would operate (only that at night it sounds just like crickets) - is actually still real and really happened, is shocking.

Mindless2112• 2 years ago

This study isn't evidence against it.

The NIH study, which began in 2018 and included more than 80 Havana syndrome patients, wasn't designed to examine the likelihood of some weapon or other trigger for Havana syndrome symptoms.

tokai2• 2 years ago

I know. I wrote "no evidence for".

francisofascii• 2 years ago

While I agree there is not evidence of a weapon, I am not buying hypochondria. The amount of reports and the peculiarity of the hearing symptoms don't add up to hypochondria. Local environmental pathogens or chemicals could be a cause. Also, our ability to detect such pathogens or brain abnormalities is still very limited, so finding no abnormalities is not surprising.

ceejayoz2• 2 years ago

Lots of reports and peculiar symptoms don't rule out psychogenic causes.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mass_psychogenic_illness

We had a case of it near us in upstate New York a few years back. https://www.nytimes.com/2012/03/11/magazine/teenage-girls-tw... (https://archive.is/EoY7e)

wnc3141• 2 years ago

i wonder if there's legal precedent for management induced mental illness as other physical workplace hazards have

bjourne2• 2 years ago

The hysteria wouldn't even have started if it wasn't for the "top men" hypothesis. If women had experienced similar symptoms absolutely no one would have suggested sonic weapons over stress from overwork or other psychogenic factors. The underlying idea is that male diplomats with prestigious careers are highly-trained professionals or something and thus immune to outbreaks of mass hysteria. That clearly is not the case.

marginalia_nu• 2 years ago

Chronic stress affects your brain though. It's common to find hippocampus abnormalities in burnout patients.

asdff• 2 years ago

It makes you think about the implications of this. A stressed workforce is not an efficient one at all. Say you want to get an advantage against your competitor without directly attacking their labor. How might you increase stress levels? What levers can you pull to make these diplomats to pull all nighters at the embassy for weeks at a time? I imagine its very cheap to pull such levers if you are an enemy intelligence agency who is read up on american standard operating procedure.

pyinstallwoes• 2 years ago

What about the physical evidence from Gary Nolan?

timbo1642• 2 years ago

This is the most foolish and most uneducated response I've read. You're saying nonsense.

Just because we don't have the weapon that causes the issue the issue doesn't exist and is all in their heads?

Get educated about what you're talking about. Watch some interviews of people that have it.

We even know the exact sound the weapon makes.

You have absolutely no idea what you're talking about.

Aurornis• 2 years ago

Yet sophisticated MRI scans detected no significant differences in brain volume, structure or white matter — signs of injury or degeneration

In case it wasn’t clear: Neuroimaging can’t visualize every possible problem. They performed one type of testing and didn’t find anything.

That’s not the same as concluding that there are no problems.

It should go without saying that a clean MRI isn’t proof that other neurological symptoms aren’t real, though I see some other commenters jumping to conclusions.

PaulKeeble2• 2 years ago

You can't for example see ME/CFS or Long Covid neural damage on a typical MRI but when you do autopsies you find a host of problems including complete viral RNA and intrusion of the immune system that shouldn't be there. Given the similar presentation of Havana syndrome to ME/CFS it would seem sensible to look for some of the similar markers of vascular brain damage with the process developed there by Jared Younger and we will likely find a similar type of brain abnormalities. Just because it doesn't appear on MRI doesn't mean its the only type of test that can be done to find abnormalities in the brain, there are a lot of possibilities for further tests in similar presentations of symptoms.

oldstrangers3• 2 years ago

Very unrelated but if anyone reading this is dealing with long covid/brain fog related symptoms, try famotidine (pepcid).

ineedaj0b• 2 years ago

I have heard you can see long Covid on an MRI. There will be more papers on it in the future

tantalor2• 2 years ago

Absence of evidence is not evidence of absence

ceejayoz2• 2 years ago

It's a pithy saying, but misused here.

Not bothering to look into it would be "absence of evidence".

Extensive looking into it and finding nothing much across many different people and many different scans by many different researchers is a form of evidence.

diogenescynic8• 2 years ago

This is a cop out argument in my opinion because you can never prove a negative. This is just more FUD. You can just always make this argument even if all evidence points to the contrary. "Well you just haven't found the right evidence yet." Right....

instagib• 2 years ago

You can be scanned every way with different frequencies or methods and still not find a cause for migraines. Then find it can be stress, referred pain, or many other things.

Use the medicines to fix many issues and the mechanism for its action is unknown yet produces a positive outcome. This affected a handful of people yet gets a lot of attention like shark attacks versus drowning.

Any topics that are outside of the programming space are getting significantly worse for comments to where it’s becoming a waste of time to refute them or even acknowledge that they are trolls.

coliveira2• 2 years ago

You can believe on your pet conspiracy theory, however the fact is that there is no evidence these people were affected by anything real.

jmyeet2• 2 years ago

Everyone who looked at Havana Syndrome when it came out with a critical eye realized immediately it was a BS story. Sonic weapons? Oh please.

Thing is, this sort of thing happens all the time. A prominent and current example is cops and fentanyl. If you listen to cops, they will tell you that just being in the rom with fentanyl can be deadly, breathing it in can be deadly. I'm not sure where this started but it's become a problem because cmany people believe it, leading to cops having psychosomatic panic attacks at the prospect of fentanyl exposure [1]. This story has become so effective that many people disbelieve that it's BS or are surprised to learn it.

So the intersting question is: what purpose do these sorts of stories serve?

With fentanyl, it squarely fits into "copaganda", spreading the idea that being a police officer is super dangerous. Not-so-fun fact: it's more dangerous being married to a cop than it is being a cop (eg [2]).

Another example of this is inflating the numbers of line-of-duty police officer deaths with Covid deaths, particularly because it includes officers who refused to get vaccinated [3].

Fear of crime serves a political purpose. Crime is lower on pretty much every metric than it was 20-30 years ago where the last big panic set in the mandatory minimum mania and the carceral state exploded.

So the obvious conclusion to draw from what purpose Havana Syndrome serves is either selling the story of how bad and dangerous Cuba is and/or how dangerous it is to be a foreign official (which is really a proxy for CIA).

[1] https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7492952/

[2] https://www.theatlantic.com/national/archive/2014/09/police-...

[3] https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2023/mar/03/covid-police...

immibis3• 2 years ago

This sort of thing isn't unheard of. It's not like the USA wouldn't do the same to diplomats from other countries if it wanted to. It's not like every pair of nearby embassies and the host country don't have various radio beams pointed at each other all the time. You can easily imagine at least one simple possibility: Cuba replicated The Thing and is using a microwave beam to power it which is too strong.

immibis3• 2 years ago

Downvoters on this one should leave comments explaining why they disagree.

fngjdflmdflg2• 2 years ago

Crime is lower on pretty much every metric than it was 20-30 years ago where the last big panic set in the mandatory minimum mania and the carceral state exploded.

Crime was very high in the 1990s though and it's regulation wasn't from a sudden "panic" but a steady growth from 1950 as it climbed from 5 deaths by homicide per 100,000 in 1950 to 10.4 in 1980 and 9.4 in 1990.[0] If anything there is more "mania" about semiautomatic weapons which have contributed a minuscule amount to these deaths. But I don't think discussing either issue in terms of who has more mania is helpful in any event.

[0] https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/data/hus/2019/005-508.pdf (Table 5)

janalsncm• 2 years ago

Homicides in the US today are 7.8/100k, which is still above the 1950 number. I wonder what accounts for the difference. Globally, the US has a higher rate than other countries likely due to guns, but it’s not like guns were illegal in 1950.

GuB-423• 2 years ago

Everyone who looked at Havana Syndrome when it came out with a critical eye realized immediately it was a BS story.

There is a lot of bullshit around it, sure, but no one seem to dispute the reality of the symptoms. It may be psychosomatic, and I honestly think it is the most likely explanation, but it doesn't solve the problem. If diplomats in Cuba went crazy, then why did they go crazy? Diplomats are people and I prefer when people don't get crazy.

Somebody here suggested a form of burnout, fine, then why did people in Cuba burn out? Burnout is not BS, and maybe something has to be done about the work conditions. And maybe, with that knowledge, if similar symptoms appear elsewhere, it would be a good occasion to send an work inspector.

diogenescynic8• 2 years ago

How is this any different than a placebo effect? You could give everyone a sugar pill and then if a few people started complaining about the side effects, another 30-40% would quickly follow. The human brain is incredibly susceptible to group think. I can't remember the exact psychological experiment, but I remember learning about how they did an experiment where they'd have a group look at pictures of things to define a color (i.e. the apple is red or green, the milk is white) and there would be person involved who was a collaborator with the study and would be loud and vocal, but every now and then make an obvious mistake (the dot would be orange, they'd say it was yellow) and other people would just agree with them since the other times they were right so the non-collaborators would actually change their answer from what they saw with their own eyes, to something they didn't but was just suggested by the defacto loudmouth in the group.

speed_spread• 2 years ago

A possible source for the aiborne fentanyl story: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moscow_theater_hostage_crisi...

edgyquant• 2 years ago

Using the 30 year statistic as proof there’s no crime is extreme dishonesty. You’re taking about the tail end of the crack epidemic which saw some of the worst crime in our nations history. Further, this is true on average but people in major cities have seen a rise in crime with a city like Seattle having its highest rates in a generation. Even cities like SF have not recovered to pre-Covid levels.

diogenescynic8• 2 years ago

I agree with pretty much everything except for this:

Crime is lower on pretty much every metric than it was 20-30 years ago where the last big panic set in the mandatory minimum mania and the carceral state exploded.

I see 'crime' all over now... it just isn't considered a crime now that it's been decriminalized. 20-30 years ago, I never ever saw open drug sales and drug use, open prostitution, mass looting/shoplifting, deaths from overdoses are exponentially worse, car break ins constantly, etc. And I do agree with the copaganda arguments in general, but I just can't align how much visible crime is all over the West Coast and this vague notion that crime isn't getting worse. Yeah, maybe if you're only tracking murders... but everything else is so much worse and our kids will be exposed to things we never saw until we were well past adulthood.

jmyeet2• 2 years ago

I see 'crime' all over now..

This is anecdotal. The data just doesn't back it up (eg [1]). You've brought up a number of issues As for retail theft, even the Walgreens CEO had to admit the problem was overstated [2]. There are a bunch of reasons for it. One is the crime narrative. Another is its easier for companies to blame theft rather than poor inventory management and retail operations.

When you say you "see" crime everywhere, I suspect you mean it's all over your [social media of choice]. Today everyone has a camera.

Another example is kidnapping. It wasn't that long ago we had the generation with TV ads asking parents if they knew where their kids were and telling them to come home when the street lights came on. Now? There's a completely overblown fear of kidnappings. We hear figures of >800K children being reported missing a year. Almost all of them are custody issues. Stranger kidnappings are more like ~8/year [3].

Fomenting fear of a crime epidemic is an intentional and well-funded political objective.

[1] https://www.nytimes.com/2023/11/29/briefing/shoplifting-data...

[2] https://www.nytimes.com/2023/01/06/business/walgreens-shopli...

[3] https://www.reuters.com/article/idUSL1N2SY199/

someotherperson• 2 years ago

I'm waiting for it to turn out to be something stupid like highly lead-contaminated cutlery, furniture and other things. Or maybe some sort of pesticide or insecticide being sprayed on or around the building.

roxgib• 2 years ago

Can't speak to pesticides, but lead would have been detected in blood tests

applied_heat• 2 years ago

One study did identify heavy pesticide use due to concerns about Zika virus and measured changes in people’s brains before and after their trips to Cuba:

https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/havana-syndrome-neurotoxin-en...

bjourne2• 2 years ago

It was the sound of crickets: https://www.rollingstone.com/politics/politics-news/havana-s...

SuperNinKenDo• 2 years ago

People like to believe in medical "certainty". This kind of headline is just a symptom of that. All this headline really means is that it has failed to find where the abnormalities are, but we translate not finding brain abnormalities, to there being none. This is why you need to be your own advocate when it comes to your health, you can't allow yourself to be talked down because some arbitrary test tells you you're not experiencing what you are. Unfortunately, most people only find this out the hard way.

stonedge• 2 years ago

There was an episode of the German Krimi series Tatort yesterday that had a plot that centered around Havana Syndrome.

geor9e• 2 years ago

There have been a lot of "mass-hysteria" events in history, but we never seem to develop good strategies to detect it, other than years later historians saying "we never really found a shred of evidence…"

rapjr9• 2 years ago

I find a few issues with the study paper:

The papers results section says: Results Among the 81 participants with AHIs, the mean (SD) age was 42 (9) years and 49% were female; among the 48 control participants, the mean (SD) age was 43 (11) years and 42% were female. Imaging scans were performed as early as 14 days after experiencing AHIs with a median delay period of 80 (IQR, 36-544) days. After adjustment for multiple comparisons, no significant differences between participants with AHIs and control participants were found for any MRI modality. At an unadjusted threshold (Pless than .05), compared with control participants, participants with AHIs had lower intranetwork connectivity in the salience networks, a larger corpus callosum, and diffusion MRI differences in the corpus callosum, superior longitudinal fasciculus, cingulum, inferior cerebellar peduncle, and amygdala. The structural MRI measurements were highly reproducible (median coefficient of variation less than 1% across all global volumetric ROIs and less than 1.5% for all white matter ROIs for diffusion metrics). Even individuals with large differences from control participants exhibited stable longitudinal results (typically, less than ±1% across visits), suggesting the absence of evolving lesions. The relationships between the imaging and clinical variables were weak (median Spearman =0.10). The study did not replicate the results of a previously published investigation of AHIs.

So it seems they did find large differences, but the differences did not change which they interpret as "the absence of evolving lesions" and hence nothing to worry about. If this was one time damage from exposure to something why would they expect evolving lesions? How can they ignore the large differences they did find compared to the control subjects?

Also they say they started the study in 2018, but the original cases started in 2016, so based on their subject selection criteria their results only apply to people who reported AHIs in later years.

5-year study finds no brain abnormalities in 'Havana Syndrome' patients

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