$5 million for Jason & Katz for 2 CFS studies in students & children

[Simon]

Now this is very nice:

Grant awarded to DePaul professor Leonard A. Jason for psych study

Professor Lenny Jason, who himself had glandular fever and developed CFS, has finally got the funding his smart research deserves.

• $2 million for a 20,000-household community-based prevalence studies of youths aged 5-17

• $3 million for a prospective study of students who develop infectious mononucleosis (glandular fever) which will track their progress and measure how many develop CFS - crucially it will also collect data from most students before they get ill.

From the NIH website
Many candidate psychological and biological risk factors have been proposed to explain this phenomenon, but almost all lack prospective data from before the patients became ill with either IM or CFS.

Some students develop IM while in college. Many student health services have students who use their services when they are medically well ( e.g., for sports- related injuries and birth control).

Our study will enroll Northwestern University (NU) students who use the university based health services when medically well, as well as after they develop IM and CFS. We will gather biological and psychological data when students are well, when they develop IM, and when they develop CFS.

At the end of the 3 year recruitment period, we will continue to follow those who have developed CFS for 12 months. We will collect data regarding candidate biological and psychological factors thought to be related to the development of CFS, such as previous stressful life events, "action proneness", coping skills, autonomic dysfunction, cytokine levels and the severity of the IM itself.

Our proposed study will compare these prospective pre-illness (IM) variables to post- illness (IM) data between students who do and do not go on to develop CFS. This study will be able to identify risk factors for the development of CFS following IM. We have the unique ability to implement this prospective study with a "captive" and high-risk population for the development of IM and CFS.

 

[Firestormm]

More about the $2 million prevalence study here: http://forums.phoenixrising.me/inde...etermine-prevalence-of-cfs-in-children.26953/

I saw this article/blog earlier this morning about Lenny with some comments from the team at DePaul that might be of interest:

Grant awarded to DePaul professor Leonard A. Jason for psych study

Last month, Leonard A. Jason, a DePaul psychology professor, received a $2 million grant for a five-year study that focuses on Chronic Fatigue Syndrome (CFS) among children.

CFS is a disorder that entails extreme fatigue; the cause of CFS is unknown. “Energy is very important,” Dr. Jason said. “It’s a dominant endurance and if you don’t have it, you are in big trouble because there are very high expectations for people to achieve and to get a lot of stuff done.”

Jason has studied CFS for the past 25 years. In 1989, he became very ill and even left the university for a year. He was diagnosed with mononucleosis, and later he was diagnosed with CFS.

“Because I had a personal experience with this illness, I decided to look at the literature and what I found indicated that there were a lot of things that were problematic that I could study,” Jason said.

According to Jason, there have never been methodologically sound and community-based prevalence studies of youth. The study is aiming to analyze over 20,000 households who have children.

Jason said after identifying at-risk children, they will bring them to the Lurie Children’s Hospital to get a complete medical and psychiatric evaluation.

Jason also received a $3 million grant to study mono as a possible risk factor among college students. Based on this study, Jason and his team will interview college students: taking students’ blood samples, making profiles of them, and trying to find the risk factors.

“Our study will look at risk factors for developing CFS, and it is a prospective longitudinal study of college students over time,” Jason said. “This will nicely complement our community based prevalence study youth ages five-seventeen.”
http://www.depauliaonline.com/news/...-jason-for-psych-study-1.3132864#.UuaKtfvFKUl
Read more...

 

[Snow Leopard]

Sounds like some great studies, Jason is pretty much the most qualified and experienced person right now to do these sorts of studies (in my opinion).

 

[alex3619]

A prospective study is exactly what we need.

 

[Esther12]

Good news.

Our proposed study will compare these prospective pre-illness (IM) variables to post- illness (IM) data between students who do and do not go on to develop CFS. This study will be able to identify risk factors for the development of CFS following IM. We have the unique ability to implement this prospective study with a "captive" and high-risk population for the development of IM and CFS.

I have some concern here that, due to the arbitrary cut-offs for CFS post-IM, they could pick up psychosocial risk factors for simply being less positive on questionnaires. This is something I've wondered about 'perfectionism' - if 'perfectionists' are just more likely to accurately identify losses of capacity and be unhappy about it than others.

Obviously there are also things like depression, which might correlate with reporting symptoms less positively. Possibly people with less money/opportunities/social connections would be less able to adapt to a loss of capacity.

Hopefully there will be some attempt to collect info for more objective external measures than just subjective self-report questionnaires (maybe academic performance?). For me, I'm interested in learning about the risk factors for the actual loss of capacity which can follow IM, and would like to see an attempt to distinguish that from the problems which a loss of capacity can lead to. I realise this is hard to do though. $3 million sounds hopeful though.

 

[biophile]

Sounds good, as long as the criteria for CFS caseness is adequate. I also share Esther12's concerns about questionnaires. Jason is the kind of researcher for this (compared to certain UK researchers), although in some of his previous papers I had some mild but lingering concerns about false-positives for psychological co-morbidities.

We need a large well-conducted prospective study on those who end up being medically diagnosed patients, to help resolve the premorbid stress controversy, which is currently based on poor evidence and ideological speculation.

 

[Esther12]

Jason does seem aware of, and keen to overcome these sorts of problems.

Having thought about it, I don't think that academic outcomes would, in isolation, be a good outcome measure. there are probably lots of psychosocial confounds that would affect this.

Maybe actometers would be best, but probably not practical for a study like this... even with $3 million. Nothing would be perfect anyway.

 

[Simon]

Update from @Tom Kindlon, taken from Project Information - NIH RePORTER

Five year study, already under way, $700k spend this year alone ($3m total), so this is one of the biggest CFS projects out there:

Abstract

About 12% of young adults will meet the criteria for chronic fatigue
syndrome (CFS) 6 months following infectious mononucleosis (IM) (Katz
et al., 2011).

IM appears to be a predisposing factor for some individuals who develop CFS.

Many candidate psychological and biological risk factors have been
proposed to explain this phenomenon, but almost all lack prospective
data from before the patients became ill with either IM or CFS.

Some students develop IM while in college.

Many student health services have students who use their services when
they are medically well ( e.g., for sports- related injuries and birth
control).

Our study will enroll Northwestern University (NU) students who use
the university based health services when medically well, as well as
after they develop IM and CFS.

We will gather biological and psychological data when students are
well, when they develop IM, and when they develop CFS.

At the end of the 3 year recruitment period, we will continue to
follow those who have developed CFS for 12 months.

We will collect data regarding candidate biological and psychological
factors thought to be related to the development of CFS, such as
previous stressful life events, "action proneness", coping skills,
autonomic dysfunction, cytokine levels and the severity of the IM
itself.

[comment: the Dubbo studies which looked at glandular fever, (as well as 2 other illnesses but found the same results across all 3 illnesses) found that the severity of initial illness, and the level of initial cytokine response, were highly predictive of subsequent CFS, while psychosocial factors were not. It's good to see a bigger and better study looking at the same factors]

Our proposed study will compare these prospective pre-illness (IM)
variables to post- illness (IM) data between students who do and do
not go on to develop CFS.

This study will be able to identify risk factors for the development
of CFS following IM.

We have the unique ability to implement this prospective study with a
"captive" and high-risk population for the development of IM and CFS.


PUBLIC HEALTH RELEVANCE:

The main purpose of this prospective study is to investigate
biological and/or psychological factors present in young adults
predict who will go on to develop CFS following IM.

Identification of risk factors predisposing patients towards
developing CFS may help to understand the underlying mechanisms of
this illness.


Contact PI / Project Leader Information: Name: KATZ, BEN Z.

Project runs 5 years from 1 Dec 2013 - 30 Nov 2018

Administering Institutes or Centers:
NATIONAL INSTITUTE OF ALLERGY AND INFECTIOUS DISEASES
Project Funding Information for 2014: $701,037