Whole blood human transcriptome and virome analysis of ME/CFS patients experiencing PEM following CPET (Bouquet et al., 2019)

[Pyrrhus]

Not new, but this 2019 publication by virologist Charles Chiu in collaboration with the Workwell foundation probably deserves its own thread. The study looked at whole blood, including white blood cells, in 14 female patients diagnosed with the Canadian Consensus Criteria:


Whole blood human transcriptome and virome analysis of ME/CFS patients experiencing PEM following CPET (Bouquet et al., 2019)
https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0212193

Previously, we did not detect evidence of immune dysregulation or virus reactivation outside of PEM periods. Here we sought to determine whether cardiopulmonary exercise stress testing of ME/CFS patients could trigger such changes.

ME/CFS patients (n = 14) and matched sedentary controls (n = 11) were subjected to cardiopulmonary exercise on 2 consecutive days and followed up to 7 days post-exercise, and longitudinal whole blood samples analyzed by RNA-seq.
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We detected sequences from a small number of viruses in the RNA-seq data, including enterovirus A, influenza A virus, anelloviruses/torque teno viruses (TTVs), and human herpesviruses (HHVs) (Table 5).
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The overall virome composition in ME/CFS did not differ significantly from controls (P = 0.746 by chi-square test)
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Reasons for the absence of differential gene expression between ME/CFS patients and controls include
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(3) localization of ME/CFS pathogenicity to a specific tissue (e.g. skeletal muscle or brain tissue) rather than blood
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here, we observed no differences in viral abundance in ME/CFS patients following exercise.
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A limitation of the current study is the small size of the study cohort.