Levi
Senior Member
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..........
That was a big study in Germany (which brings in geographic issues) and shows just how difficult this stuff can be. Science takes so many loops and turns. Another recent article on XMRV appeared to validate its existence in malignant prostate cancer in the US.
Geography? Is XMRV in Europe? It appears to be in Japan.
ScienceDaily (Oct. 15, 2009) The xenotropic murine leukemia virus-related virus (XMRV) which has previously been linked to prostate cancer has been found to have a dramatically lower prevalence among German prostate cancer patients, if any. Contrary to some reports, which have found XMRV in 40% of cases in patients in the US with familial prostate cancer, research published today in BioMed Central's open access journal, Retrovirology, has found no link between the two conditions in a large study of German prostate cancer patients.
Has anyone got any good questions I could ask?
With new pathogens, the method of detection is key. If it wasn't key then the work would already been done by someone else. Two pathogens come to mind. Helicobacter Pylori. Marshall & Warren had to discover new methods of finding this illusive bug. The other is Chlamydia pneumoniae. If you read through the Stratton patents, a substantial portion is devoted to how to detect it.
So I can imagine that there are two ways of detecting XMRV. One which works (the WPI way) and one which is almost guaranteed not to work (the German method). So like everything else its going to come down to politics. Which is why the WPI work needs to be replicated by friendly (or at least neutral) parties to build up enough momentum so that the work can not be simply dismissed by the opposing camp.
Prostate tissue samples were collected from 589 patients undergoing prostatectomy at the Universittsmedizin Berlin. DNA was extracted from the biopsy material, and polymerase chain reaction (PCR) was used to detect the presence of XMRV. None of the samples were found to contain viral DNA. Furthermore, no antibodies to XMRV were detected in serum from 146 prostate cancer patients.
Two other studies have addressed the prevalence of XMRV in Germany and Ireland. In the German study, one of 105 samples from patients with prostate cancer was found to contain viral DNA. In the Irish study, no XMRV sequences were detected in 139 patient samples.
There are at least three ways to explain the results of the most recent German study. The trivial explanation is that the assay methods were not sufficiently sensitive to detect XMRV nucleic acid or antibodies. If I were working on the German samples, I would ask the authors of the American study to examine them for XMRV using their methods. Another possibility is that XMRV is geographically restricted. Alternatively, more than one gammaretrovirus might be associated with prostate cancer, which would not have been detected by the methods used by the German group.
O I'm sorry. I just was reading about that last night and didn't see it on the forum already (not that I even looked!).