This was posted at the Microbiome Discovery Project's facebook page yesterday. It's part of the text from Dr. Hanson's Study IACFS/ME poster abstracts: "Altered Gut Microbiome in ME/CFS Patients"
Statistical analysis revealed significant fewer members of the Bacteroidetes and significantly more members of the Firmicutes in the patient population - also reported in Crohn’s disease and acute ulcerative colitis (both are inflammatory bowel diseases). [My bolding.]
https://www.facebook.com/microbediscovery/posts/705332726202431
This is interesting to me because my mother had chronic ulcerative colitis most of her adult life. A few years after I came down with ME/CFS, I too was diagnosed with CUC. However, after only a month on Azulfidine, my "CUC" mysteriously vanished and another doctor told me that I had been a misdiagnosed. He suggested that my symptoms had been caused by "Montezuma's Revenge," but I had not been much out of the house, let alone out of the country. Also, my intestinal symptoms actually began only a few months after I got ME and they had become progressively worse in the intervening
3 years. Whatever I'd had, it was clearly not an acute and transitory infection.
Back then, my mother also related to me how she had been in a kind of inexplicable "fog" in her early 30's. She never connected this to her CUC diagnosis which was made around the same time. I truly wonder if she had been experiencing the kind of "brain fog" than ME/CFS patients experience. For her, this "fog" eventually lifted, but she had CUC for the remainder of her life.
Anyway, it is certainly interesting to see Dr. Hanson's research finding in ME/CFS patients micorbiome alterations previously seen in inflammatory bowel diseases. This seems like an awfully important finding.
