justinreilly
Senior Member
- Messages
- 2,498
- Location
- NYC (& RI)
From Cort's Blog (as pointed out by JT1024):
http://aboutmecfs.org/Conf/IACFSME09WPI.aspx
[emphasis added]
http://aboutmecfs.org/Conf/IACFSME09WPI.aspx
Unsettling Associations: The Incline Village Cancer Cluster
Of all the problems associated with ME/CFS one would have hoped that the ‘Big C’ wouldn’t be one of them. But the evidence presented at the conference suggests that at least with this particular cohort of patient it’s a very real problem.
Dr. Peterson got Dr. Mikovits, a cancer researcher, interested when he mentioned at a conference in Spain that he had nine patients with Non-Hodgkins Lymphoma (NHL). NHL strikes about 2 out of every 10,000 people in the US (0.02%) but a full 5% of Dr. Peterson’s Nevada cohort had developed it. Even more striking was the type of specific of type of lymphoma he was finding.
Mantle Cell Lymphoma is a form of non-Hodgkins Lymphoma (NHL) that is almost vanishingly rare. If my back of the envelope statistics are correct MCL strikes about 1 out of every 100,000 people …but thirty percent of Dr. Peterson’s ME/CFS cancer patients had it. That’s the kind of finding that will turn a cancer researchers head and it got Dr. Mikovits, a viral cancer researcher associated with the HHV-6 Foundation’s attention. She told me she knew right away that ‘that’s a virus’. She was soon off for the summer to Reno to look more closely at this cohort.
Incline Village Map Dr. Gagen, a biostatician was engaged to take closer look at this cohort. Was it real? Her presentation was fascinating. She began to work her way down her slides of the region. Yes there was a large cluster of cancer cases in the general area. But where exactly was it? She ticked down several slides narrowing the focus – and then there it was - one brightly highlighted section almost pulsing out at you – Incline Village. It was an eerie moment. Even she said she was surprised to see that location pop out so vividly.
(Most people in Dr. Peterson’s cohort do not have cancer but enough of them do have these rare cancers to make the group stand out. Dr. Peterson pointed out two patients in an early North Carolina cohort with this type of cancer but what about other physician’s patients? If they’re there we haven’t heard of them. At a recent seminar Dr. Peterson recommended that physicians with long-term patients screen them for cancer.)
The cancer subset was real. Now the search was on to find its cause. Dr. Mikovits, our connection to the National Cancer Institute, felt it had to be a virus. But which one? The WPI set out to find out...
[emphasis added]