Why the Most Common Chronic Disease in the Modern World Remains Undefined
Throughout human history, identifying a disease required three simple things:
- Recognizable symptoms
- A predictable clinical course
- Abnormal physical findings or lab results
With today’s scientific tools—genomics, neuroimaging, precision laboratory diagnostics—one would assume we have every common disease fully mapped and understood. Yet there is a major contradiction hiding in plain sight:
The most common chronic condition in the modern world has never been formally recognized as a single disease.
Instead, it shows up wearing dozens of disguises: depression, anxiety, ADHD, eating disorders, panic attacks, migraines, PTSD, fibromyalgia, irritable bowel syndrome—on and on.
In 2003, Harvard psychiatrists Dr. James Hudson and Dr. Harrison Pope suggested that many of these conditions were actually manifestations of a single underlying pathology. They proposed a unifying diagnosis called Affective Spectrum Disorder (ASD).
They were onto something—but one critical piece was missing:
What was the mechanism behind all these symptoms?
Without identifying the root cause, ASD disappeared from medical conversation and from clinical practice.
What they couldn’t observe at the time is what I began to see in my clinic in northern Minnesota—patterns linking brain dysfunction with measurable changes in body fat and metabolic function. These patterns reveal a condition even more widespread, more overlooked, and more consequential than ASD ever accounted for.
This series unpacks what I discovered and why it matters.
