It's Officially Official: Chronic Fatigue Syndrome Linked to Virus

from the ME-CFSCommunity.com:


Finally, the National Academy of Sciences Makes It Official:

Detection of MLV-related virus gene sequences in blood of patients with chronic fatigue syndrome and healthy donors

Release of study findings

Additional Stories:

New York Times

Washington Post:

A well-respected team of scientists released long-awaited new evidence Monday that a virus may be playing a role in chronic fatigue syndrome.

The researchers, from the National Institutes of Health, the Food and Drug Administration and Harvard Medical School, analyzed blood samples that had been collected 15 years ago from 37 patients with chronic fatigue syndrome. Most of the subjects--32, or 86.5 percent--tested positive for a virus known as a murine leukemia virus-related virus, the researchers found. In contrast, tests on 44 healthy blood donors detected evidence of the virus in only three of the subjects, or 6.8 percent.

While providing new evidence that a virus may play a role in the mysterious condition, the researchers said the findings, published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, are no where near proving the virus causes the syndrome.

But the findings are being hailed by advocates for chronic fatigue syndrome patients, such as the CFID Association of America. The head of that group, Kim McCleary, says the findings are a potentially important step toward finding the cause of the condition and possibly developing treatments, as well as dispelling the notion that the condition is really psychological....

- Wall Street Journal

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