A nanoelectronics-blood-based diagnostic biomarker for ME/CFS (2019) Esfandyarpour, Davis et al

Forbin said:
I'm thinking that Gulf War Syndrome (GWS) might be a really important disease to test the nano-needle against.

Nancy Klimas says that the GWS and MECFS are symptomatically indistinguishable. I don't know if that extends to objective measures of dysfunction, like a 2-day CPET, but it might.

Given the similar symptomology, if the nano-needle can distinguish between GWS and MECFS, you could probably rule out that it's detecting common consequences of the diseases, like deconditioning, anxiety, belonging to an online support group:rolleyes:, etc.

If it can't distinguish between GWS and MECFS, then it might be detecting a similar underlying process, which would be important if relatively few other diseases showed the same signal.
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I asked the OMF about testing GWS patients last September.
https://www.s4me.info/threads/ronal...tation-at-the-iimec13.5793/page-4#post-106159
 
rvallee said:
I really don't see the problem with the nanoneedle also identifying other diseases. It could even be a good thing if it brings funding from multiple sources. The pool of diseases that cause this level of exhaustion is tiny so reducing the differential diagnosis search space from hundreds of possible explanations to a handful is still extremely positive, for us and others who could be identified by it.
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I was just thinking that the more numerous and varied the diseases that the nanoneedle detects, the more difficult it's going to be figure out the common denominator, and it would increase the likelihood that the denominator is a common consequence of most diseases.

Which makes me wonder if it wouldn't be a good idea to run the test on identical twins, where only one has ME. If it's positive in both, it might indicate that it's related to some kind of uncommon genetic predisposition that is present, but rare, in the healthy population.

Just thinking out loud. I'm sure they've already considered these possibilities and so many more that I couldn't even imagine.
 
wdb said:
The news has even made its way to some tech sites
https://gizmodo.com/researchers-say-they-ve-created-a-blood-test-for-chroni-1834421604
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19831932
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nuclx 2 hours ago reply

What kind of harm does exercise do? Can you refer to any sources?

reply

bpfrh 18 minutes ago [-]

It leads to worsening of the illness. A CFS patient who goes beyond the boundaries of his energy reservers [sic] shrinks these. That leads to smaller and smaller energy reservers, till you can't get out of the bed, sit upright, read longer text, type longer comments.
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In the comments, this captures in a nutshell what excessive exercise can potentially do to pwME - pushing too hard past energy reserves, can shrink those reserves each time you do it, in a vicious downward spiral. Few words, big message.
 
wdb said:
The news has even made its way to some tech sites
https://gizmodo.com/researchers-say-they-ve-created-a-blood-test-for-chroni-1834421604
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19831932
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Uh, the discussion on YC surprised me. It's usually a pretty "bro" community and when Afflicted was posted there it was the usual hate-fest. There was serious interest here. Yet more cracks in the damn (not a typo).

It definitely helps that this is heavy on technology. The main issue has always been to convince people that it's a problem worth solving. It's such a fascinating puzzle that should motivate anyone trying to make serious headways onto unbeaten paths.
 
rvallee said:
Uh, the discussion on YC surprised me. It's usually a pretty "bro" community and when Afflicted was posted there it was the usual hate-fest. There was serious interest here. Yet more cracks in the damn (not a typo).
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One of the comments:

You don't want to get CFS while in Army
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The guy recovered eventually though... Though maybe it was the physical activity that exacerbated the symptoms post-EBV in the first place...
 
strategist said:
It's being discussed on the medicine subreddit. Always interesting to see how they react to this kind of news.

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One takeaway, as usual, is how little they understand about it or that it's even worth the trouble. Strong attachment to the psychosomatic model, there is so much invested in it, especially the "his son being sick is a conflict of interest", just plain bizarre.

At least there are no overt insults or mockery. I guess that's some progress...
 
One comment says
A little convenient that their tool for sorting the cells apart is also a completely untested and unvalidated tool for testing "stress". With a sample size of just 20 cases and controls, it's really not that hard to find thousands of "tests" that can sort the two groups apart with high sensitivity and specificity.
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Obtaining a complete separation of ME/CFS patients and controls on a biological measure is actually very difficult. I'm not sure any clear separation like the in nanoneedle results have been reported before in ME/CFS.
 
Another comment
Personally, I think a bigger source of skepticism stems from the PI being personally affected by CFS. In the article, it states that his son has CFS. I understand that many researchers enter a specific field due to personal experience, but given the uncertainty and controversy surrounding a CFS diagnosis, I can imagine that this would be a very biasing factor.
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The idea that being a father to and living in the same household as a patient would make someone an unreliable researcher isn't very convincing.

What they really want to say here I suspect is that they simply don't like that someone believes ME/CFS is a serious organic illness.

If anything being able to observe the patient every day in their daily life over years is very helpful to understand the illness.
 
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strategist said:
Another comment


The idea that living in the same household as a patient would make someone an unreliable researcher isn't very convincing.

What they really want to say here I suspect is that they simply don't like that someone believes ME/CFS is a serious organic illness.
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I think they are trying to pick holes in it...picking anything they can. It’s a technique in a debate to pick something left field say with confidence that it invalidates things to dismiss someone out of hand. By this logic though women should not be gynaecologists or someone with a child who has asthma shouldn’t treat others with asthma.

It’s clearly ridiculous to say this is a conflict of interest....how would this affect the quality of his work or his decision making to do the right thing?
 
Yet another comment
I legit read the other comment and thought it sounded like 6 or 7 other patients with conversion syndrome diagnoses I've worked with; not that conversion syndrome is really more specific a diagnosis.
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I can believe that conversion syndrome resembles ME/CFS because it's just one of the many labels that get applied to patients with illness nobody understands yet. Conversion syndrome however implies that the origin is emotional when there is no way I can see to prove or disprove this, at least in most cases. With ME/CFS at least there are people who want to figure out what's going on and it's a solvable problem, whereas people that believe in conversion disorder already think it's explained even though it's based on processes that cannot be observed. I think progress is unlikely under these circumstances.
 
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arewenearlythereyet said:
I think they are trying to pick holes in it...picking anything they can. It’s a technique in a debate to pick something left field say with confidence that it invalidates things to dismiss someone out of hand. By this logic though women should not be gynaecologists or someone with a child who has asthma shouldn’t treat others with asthma.

It’s clearly ridiculous to say this is a conflict of interest....how would this affect the quality of his work or his decision making to do the right thing?
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Clearly we should shut down all cancer research because everyone knows someone who died of cancer.

People are weird when they try to justify an irrational belief. The implication is clearly that Davis is desperately working on an impossible problem because Whitney could just walk out and resume his normal life just like that if he really wanted to. Still a long ways to go.
 
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