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Gene Signature for Post-Infections CFS

A

Aftermath

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RESEARCH: A Gene Signature for Post-Infectious ME -Chronic Fatigue Syndrome (UK)


The ME Association is delighted to announce that a provisional abstract and paper on research into gene expression, funded by our Ramsay Research Fund, has today been published by BMC Medical Genomics.

A provisional abstract of the key findings from the research carried out by Professor John Gow and colleagues, along with a link to a provisional pdf of the complete article, can be found here:

The study found that patients and healthy controls differed significantly in the level of expression of 366 genes - especially in relation to functional implications involving immune modulation, oxidative stress and apoptosis (a form of cell death in which a programmed sequence of events leads to elimination of cells without releasing harmful substances into the surrounding area).

The authors conclude:

Differential expression of key genes identified in this study offer an insight into the possible mechanism of chronic fatigue following infection. The representative biomarkers identified in this research appear promising as potential biomarkers for differential diagnosis and treatment.

THE MEA RAMSAY RESEARCH FUND (RRF)

The MEA Ramsay Research Fund is the ring-fenced research fund operated by the ME Association. It is currently funding new research into muscle abnormalities and raising funds to set up a post-mortem and tissue bank for ME research.
 

Cort

Phoenix Rising Founder
What I really like is the general consistency of the findings with oxidative stress and apoptosis showing up fairly regularly over time in several studies. What I don't like is the fact that oxidative stress is a very general finding - which many diseases share - and that other rather powerful very recent study which didn't find any gene expression differences in the ME/CFS patients vs controls. Gene expression is still really problematic in ME/CFS I believe.

Really hoping that Baraniuk's proteome brain study on cerebral spinal fluid brain proteins get replicated. It's much closer to the real action in the brain than the peripheral gene expression stuff.