New Scheibenbogen Study - IgGs and SNPs.

msf

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I guess the question is, what is causing the increased levels of cortisol in the ME/CFS patients with COMT mutations?
 

Valentijn

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I think it's a case of comparing enough things until something shows up. It looks like being Met/Met homozygous for rs4680 resulted in significantly higher cortisol when compared to the heterozygous type, but not when compared alone to the other Val/Val homozygous type. And the mean values were the same for the IgE types, but they're making a big deal out of high out-liers in a combined Met/Met and Met/Val group while sort of ignoring that there were a ton of very low values as well.

On the plus side, the patients had both CCC and Fukuda ME/CFS.

But overall, I don't think they've found anything of particular interest, if anything at all.
 
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The findings aren't necessarily 'wrong', just not relevant with respect to ME...

The Met/Met allele association with higher cortisol is interesting, but lack of specificity or sensitivity of this finding as a predictor of CFS is a problem. Likewise for the other findings...
 

bertiedog

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I'll be honest I am not really understanding this too well but I do know that my result was AA which equates to Val/Val which I don't understand! Can anyone enlighten me?

BTW I have extremely low cortisol, almost Addison's level and am on 6mg Pred daily and I also have a rubbish immune system and pick up frequent viruses.

Pam
 

Valentijn

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I'll be honest I am not really understanding this too well but I do know that my result was AA which equates to Val/Val which I don't understand! Can anyone enlighten me?
There's not anything you can conclude about that, based on the study. Like @Snow Leopard said, there's not really any relevance to ME/CFS. And there's not any direct relevance to the genotypes either.