Virus discovery: a breakthrough in fight against Chronic Fatigue Syndrome

This is huge news for anyone who suspects, has or knows someone battling this disease. Researchers are stressing that this is a preliminary finding and they are not certain if the virus is a direct cause, but the speculation is there.

In what may prove to be the first major breakthrough in the fight against the mysterious and controversial disorder known as chronic fatigue syndrome, researchers reported Thursday that they had found traces of a virus in the vast majority of affected patients.

"We are in the very early days," said Stuart Le Grice, director of the National Cancer Institute's Center of Excellence in HIV/AIDS and Cancer Virology, who organized the meeting but was not involved in the new study. "The data need to be confirmed and repeated. . . We need to know that it is a cause and not just a passenger. In a sense, we are at the same stage as we were when HIV was first discovered. Hopefully, we can take advantage of what we learned from working with it."

"It is almost unheard of to find an association of this magnitude in any study of an infectious agent and a well-defined disease, much less an [ill-defined] illness like chronic fatigue syndrome," he said in an e-mail. It is extremely difficult to prove causation with a ubiquitous virus like XMRV, and it "is even more difficult in the case of CFS, which represents a clinically and epidemiologically complex illness," he said.

Link

Video interview with Dr. Daniel Peterson (audio only)


ETA:
Additional Links

Scientific American
Science News
WSJ

[edit on 28-12-2009 by LadySkadi]

Thanks so much for this helpful information!

Hopefully now they can get going on a treatment, and probably get a lot of people back on their feet!

So many were told it was all in their head, or just were called "lazy," etc. This is some great news.

This study does have some possible benefits in the short term.

Short-Term Impacts
1. It may help convince your doctor that your illness is both "real" and "viral."
2. It may help convince the CDC that it's dealing with an infectious viral disease and that it should spend its time and money differently.
3. It may help raise the public profile of FM and CFS/ME and educate more people about how serious they are.

Resources Link
Another

reply to post by Copperflower
So true. A family member came down with this disease many years ago, it was a battle for 2 years. For some unexplained reason, the symptoms seemed to disappear (or go dormant.)

At the time, the doctors had NO clue what they were dealing with... Many believed it was an exotic virus (this person had just returned from the Caribbean) but ultimately, she was told something to the tune of "there are many viruses that are just unknown" and left it at that. The diagnosis was not confirmed, just always suspected.

When a reliable test is developed, it would be welcomed by many people, I suspect.

[edit on 28-12-2009 by LadySkadi]

Please keep us updated with any other information you find. I wonder if it may be related to Fibromyalgia...

reply to post by LadySkadi
Star and flag. I have always suspected a virus was behind CFS. Wonder why it took so long to find it? And all of the people suffering with it being told......" It's all in your head.".

reply to post by Copperflower

...I wonder if it may be related to Fibromyalgia...

Yet another question mark. There seems to be some indication that it might, but the relevance is unclear. Blood samples taken from test subjects indicate a high number of persons with XMRV retrovirus and Fibromyalgia, but there are still many questions and not many answers...

According to the Whittemore Peterson Institute, one of the partners in this research, scientists tested some blood samples from people diagnosed with fibromyalgia and found a high prevalence of XMRV in those samples. However, they point out 2 major short comings of this research:

1. The small number of blood samples tested
2. The possibility that some of those samples came from people who were misdiagnosed or had undiagnosed co-morbid chronic fatigue syndrome

link

Oh man, thanks so much for this post! Star and flag for you!

I'm allowing myself to have a little hope on this one. Wow, if I could be cured of fibromyalgia....

Thanks for this info.!!!!!!! I hope the research continues to find a cure because i believe i have it!!! i`m tired all the time for the last couple of years. aND ITS NOT CAUSE i`M LAZY!!!!!!!!!

As someone who has suffered from this since 1988, this is intriguing news. While my worst years are behind me, I still, even now, have 'bad days' when I don't feel well. I'd love to have this sorted out, once and for all.

reply to post by Jadette
That's about the same time the (family member) I mentioned also got sick. Her symptoms seem to have gone dormant over the years as well, but she still is worried that they will come back. For many years it was debilitating. It's a long time to live with something that is unknown, misunderstood and that has such a dramatic affect on one's life.

Thought I'd add this video here. It's a quick overview of how retroviruses replicate...

This is great. My mom has both CFS and Fibro, and I have some early signs of Fibro. Any research in this area is a very good thing.

Independent confirmation of the relationship between XMRV and ME/CFS in Sweden

The major finding was that DNA from the XMRV virus could be detected in the peripheral blood mononuclear cells of over two-thirds of ME/CFS patients’ samples from the blood bank in the Whittemore Peterson Institute tissue repository, but in less than 4% of healthy control samples. Also, the researchers reported that XMRV proteins were being expressed in blood cells from ME/CFS patients at very high levels compared with controls, and that patient-derived XMRV was infectious and transmissible.

These findings have caught the attention of the scientific world, but the next steps are equally important. Chief among these is for independent laboratories across the world to attempt the replication of the WPI findings among their own local populations of ME/CFS patients — it is sometimes said that replication studies are where the rubber meets the road in science!

Results of the replication studies should be available Spring/Summer 2010.

ME Research UK

Something else to wonder and I don't know WHY I have never thought of this before... but, if it is true that CFS is connected to the XMRV retrovirus, than it is plausible that this disease can be contagious via the blood. If this is true, this opens potentially huge concerns for the blood supply used for transfusions and whatnot. I now wonder if any or how many people may have been infected in the last 25+ years because there was and still is a lack of understanding about the disease/virus relationship. More Reading:

contagion Q and A



[edit on 28-12-2009 by LadySkadi]