Researchers find virus in people with Chronic Fatigue Syndrome

Posted on Oct 10, 2009 by Susie Collins in Blog, Research, Susie Collins

Researchers discover a virus in 98 percent of people with Chronic Fatigue Syndrome; study negates diagnoses of psychiatric disease once and for all.

The New York Times reports a Virus Is Found in Many With Chronic Fatigue Syndrome. The Times says an article published online Thursday in the journal Science reports that 68 of 101 patients with the syndrome, or 67 percent, were infected with an infectious virus, xenotropic murine leukemia virus-related virus, or XMRV. Continuing work has found the virus in nearly 98 percent of about 300 patients with CFS. The retrovirus is a member of the same family of viruses as the AIDS virus.

“I think this establishes what had always been considered a psychiatric disease as an infectious disease,” said Dr. Mikovits, who is research director at the Whittemore Peterson Institute in Reno, a nonprofit center created by the parents of a woman who has a severe case of the syndrome. Her co-authors include scientists from the National Cancer Institute and the Cleveland Clinic.

Pamela Weintraub at Psychology Today reports on the problem of psychiatric disease diagnosis for CFS and Lyme disease and what this new discovery means in From Chronic Fatigue to Lyme: Medically Unexplained No More:

On the Lyme disease front, one acronym of choice for the patients who fail “standard” treatments is “Medically Unexplained Symptoms,” or MUS. Another favorite phrase is “Chronic Multisymptom Illness,” or CMI. These acronyms join another favorite from dismissers –Munchausen Syndrome by Proxy, or MBP, describing the parents of the sick –in all, an alphabet soup of invented diagnoses unsupported by controlled studies in the peer review literature and damaging in the extreme. Taking a specific infection and muddying the water so much you render diagnoses this vague –well, that’s a special, dangerous art. [...] In the Lyme arena, experts labeling the patients head cases have been given free reign in the peer review, where those with like attitudes often tend the gates.

Hillary Johnson, author of Osler’s Web: Inside the Labyrinth of the Chronic Fatigue Sydrome Epidemic and blogger at oslersweb.com, sums up what this discovery means to people with CFS in her post Inside the Labyrinth: Our Vietnam War Ended Today:

From the doctors we visit, to the insurance companies that have mercilessly controlled our access to medical care and disability support, to research laboratories at major universities and in the laboratories of federal health agencies—change is coming.

A generation of quacks and sub-par investigators will be in retreat, as well. Let them pursue their study of “chronic fatigue sydnrome.”

The real scientists have arrived and they’ll be studying XMRV-associated neuro-immune disease, a.k.a., XAND.

The name ginned up in Atlanta in 1988 to make sure disability insurers would not be required to pay out on disability policies and the public would assume the malady was a new category of mental illness? One can imagine, or simply hope, that the phrase is about to be jettisoned into outer space where one can fantasize it entering the band of space trash circling the earth.

People with Chronic Fatigue Syndrome often suffer Multiple Chemical Sensitivity along with other comorbid illnesses.

For a conservative analysis of the findings, see Does a virus cause ME?

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Tags: Research