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ME/CFS South Australia Inc supports the needs of sufferers of Myalgic Encephalomyelitis, Chronic Fatigue Syndrome and related illnesses. We do this by providing services and information to members.
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Gearing up for the big search for XMRV
Tuesday 23 November 2010
From The Wall Street Journal's Health Blog:
Gearing Up for the Big Search for XMRV
Since a group of researchers published a paper in Science last year suggesting the retrovirus XMRV is linked to chronic fatigue syndrome, scientists have been debating the accuracy of that finding. Now a study designed to address that issue once and for all is moving forward.
Clinicians who treat CFS patients, scientists and others convened recently in New York, where virus hunter Ian Lipkin is based. Lipkin was asked by NIH and NIAID to head up the study.
At least three labs have agreed to test fresh blood samples for XMRV. Two labs, at FDA/NIH and the Whittemore-Peterson Institute, have previously found XMRV or related viruses in patients. The third lab, at the CDC, has not.
Clinicians who treat patients in different regions of the country, including Miami, Boston, Palo Alto, and Salt Lake City, will be collecting the blood from both healthy people and CFS patients.
Lipkin tells the Health Blog that the study focuses on whether XMRV or other viruses in the same family are found in higher frequency in patients with CFS.
As a starting point, everyone had to agree on how to define a CFS patient for the purposes of the study. The issue has been highly contentious and Lipkin says they tried to agree to criteria for patient selection that “includes everyone’s viewpoints.”
The solution: the study will seek to enroll people who in addition to meeting criteria for two widely used, symptom-based definitions of CFS, showed signs of infection — such as a sore throat or tender lymph nodes — around the time they developed CFS. The thought is that if there is a viral link to CFS, it’s most likely to show up in those patients.
More work still needs to be done. The physicians participating in the study will meet with Lipkin in coming weeks to develop a standard checklist for evaluating patients. The scientists are still working out a common protocol for how they handle and process the blood. But Lipkin tells the Health Blog that everything they are doing is designed to make it possible to finally end the debate over whether XMRV is associated with CFS.
The above originally appeared here.
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