I’m excited to share with you some of the Institute’s latest news! With the support of our donors and the State of Nevada, we continue to make critical progress in the diagnosis and treatment of ME/CFS, a complex and disabling disease process.
The Institute participated in a recently published retrospective study identifying specific biomarkers from hundreds of patient tests that were conducted as part of Dr. De Meirleir’s medical evaluations. These four blood tests, which were found to separate ME/CFS patients from controls with a high degree of specificity and sensitivity, are already available to the medical community.
“These findings emphasize the organic nature of this disease,” stated Dr. De Meirleir, study coauthor and Institute Medical Director.
Myalgic encephalomyelitis (ME) is a complex and debilitating disease that often initially presents with flu-like symptoms, accompanied by incapacitating fatigue. Currently, there are no objective biomarkers or laboratory tests that can be used to unequivocally diagnosis ME; therefore, a diagnosis is made when a patient meets a series of a costly and subjective inclusion and exclusion criteria. The purpose of this study was to evaluate the utility of four clinical parameters in diagnosing ME. The research team utilized logistic regression and classification and regression tree analysis to conduct a retrospective investigation of four clinical laboratory markers in 140 ME cases and 140 healthy controls. They found that certain parameters may help physicians in their diagnosis of ME and may additionally shed light on the pathophysiology of this disease.
“Evaluation of four clinical laboratory parameters for the diagnosis of myalgic encephalomyelitis” can be found online in the Journal of Translational Medicine at https://translational-medicine.biomedcentral.com/a…