Hip
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For example, if ME is due to an abortive viral infection hiding in the hypothalamus cells, what tests will reveal that, and what treatments will target that properly?
That's where I believe Dr Lerner's viral testing criteria come in useful, because these were aimed at detecting abortive herpesvirus infections.
In this paper, Lerner says:
Both D (diffuse) and R (restricted) components of EBV early antigen (EA) indicate abortive nonpermissive incomplete virus replication to about the first 50 early genes of sequential early and late genes in the cascade of the complete genome (Figure 1).
In this paper he says:
We propose that ME/CFS patients have nonpermissive herpesvirus (EBV, HCMV, HHV6) replication, expressing immediate-early (IE) gene products, which induce host cell dysregulation and host cell apoptosis.
So it is the immediate-early gene products which seem to be markers for abortive infection, according to Lerner.
Note that in his studies Lerner calls abortive infections "nonpermissive infections", but strictly speaking, nonpermissive describes a cell type — which when infected leads to an abortive infection. However, many other researchers seem to use "nonpermissive infection" to mean "abortive infection".