Evidence of Mitochondrial Dysfunction
So what is the evidence for some of this?
This was performed in the cell biology department at UNC Chapel Hill, believe it or not, in 1992, because the chairman of that department’s daughter had this syndrome. He called me up and said, “Is there anything I can do to help you?”
I was in Charlotte at the time. I said, “Yes, do you do any kind of energy measurements?” And he said, “Oh, that’s what we do here.”
And I said, “How do you do it?”
They used fluorescent tags of the mitochondrial membrane, and the intensity of the fluorescence is related to the degree of energy production. The higher the energy being produced, the brighter the intensity, and the lower the energy being produced, the lower the intensity of the fluorescence.
What you see here are the cells plated on a glass plate. And then they stain these lymphocytes on a plate and then they look at them with a confocal microscope that’s focused right on this plate. Then they stain it with these fluorescent dyes, and then they take off the dye in direct proportion to how much energy is being produced.
When he did this, he called me back and said, “It’s really quite shocking. Your patients don’t have any energy in their lymphocytes.”
Unfortunately, they applied for a grant to do this work, and of course, because the grant was labeled “Studying mitochondria in chronic fatigue syndrome,” it was promptly denied by the NIH.
