Hi bertiedog: just want to note that Yamamoto's point about Vitamin D receptor is not necessarily contradictory to KDM's findings. It could be that the SNPs on the VitD receptor define a 'subset' of ME, one of several genetic patterns that introduce vulnerabilities that permit ME, and that in the other patients who have other patterns, GcMAF is effective on them because their disease process works slightly differently.
To put it another way: maybe GcMAF doesn't work for the people with SNPs on the VitD receptor because the underlying genetic problem for those patients is not quite the same as the underlying problem for the rest of people with ME - and that other aetiology is something that GcMAF can deal with. Just a vague hypothesis...
While I'm on this thread, which I only dived into a couple of days ago (so I'm not really up to speed): I'm massively excited by this genetic stuff - and hugely impressed with Garcia's work on this, btw. I' hoping to spend some time crunching numbers from the spreadsheet over the weekend...but for now, a very quick observation...
There's one of the statistically significant (black) columns where the variance is that NONE (0%) of the ME patients have the allele (I think it's the mutation that nobody has, but maybe the wild type) whereas a reasonable number of the general population does.
That 0% seemed like a rather significant thing to me, so I glanced along the line of all the related genes, for which the correlation is not as statistically significant, and there's a whole row of 0%'s there too, some with a fair degree of significance.
It seems quite striking to me if there really is a type of genetic variation that just doesn't show up in any ME patients at all. This is kind of the opposite of finding that we've all got a particular mutation - in this case, none of us have it, which might suggest that if we did, we'd be protected from ME...and if that were true it might point towards treatment options...
Hoping to find lots more fascinating snippets in that data this weekend...it does immediately strike me that there's a whole raft of logical assumptions that people are going to make about this sort of analysis that just aren't necessarily so, and a whole load of logical possibilities that aren't immediately obvious - so I'm looking forward to getting stuck into that spreadsheet.
Does anybody have any links to similar datasets for ME/CFS? I haven't seen the actual details/numbers/sequences that Dr Kerr identified, does anybody have any links to that data too? Would be nice to get as much of this sort of data as possible - this sort of stuff SO should be distributed as widely as possible...I want as many mathematicians' eyes as possible on this data, asap!...
