Animal Models of ME/CFS

A friend who sees a highly respected Endo told me that there is an ME engineered mouse at a Canadian University waiting to be studied. That's all I know.

 

They'd better get in quick before it's 'cured' using LP or CBT/GET, as will be easily determined by it getting a different, or the same, SF36 score than it manages the first time.

Possibly that in itself could be a cure, scurrying around on SF36 forms with inky paws?

(Then all we'd need is surgery to give us paws and we'd be 'cured')

 

Poor mouse

 

@Simone I know this is not about a mouse model of ME/CFS but here is an excerpt from the 2018 Stanford Symposium about possibly modelling the IDO metabolic trap in cells and the different ways you can perform an experiment not easy to do in humans.

Source : https://www.omf.ngo/wp-content/uploads/2018/11/Edited-Ronald-W-Davis-Whats-Next.pdf

The OMF had a Livestream of Millions Missing San Francisco recently in May of Ron Davis talking about various topics and he said that that week he had just hired a scientist to work on yeast and if I remember right to test drugs and create compounds (some of which are produced by bacteria in the gut). I wonder if he will also look at modelling the IDO trap in yeast as was brainstormed? I thought there was a post on his MillionsMissing talk somewhere but I can't find it. H

 

Thanks, @wigglethemouse. I’m not familiar with that Gulf War research. Do you happen to know any of the researchers, so I can look it up?

 

Just googling “gulf war illness mouse” turns up several likely candidates to follow up.

 

Yep, that's exactly what I did too!

Nancy Klimas studies GWI and has used one of the mouse models whose immune expression closely resembled a subset of GWI patients. She also said she intends to create an ME/CFS mouse model.

 

@Simone Here is the Klimas mouse reference for ME/CFS from Dec 2018

Thread : https://www.s4me.info/threads/donating-to-klimas-clinical-trial.7330/#post-132288

 

That’s brilliant. Thanks, @wigglethemouse!

 

Sorry, couldn't resist...

What a mouse model of ME/CFS would look like:

 

I am somehow reminded of this mouse i had posted in another thread a while back

 

I am not so sure. A whole lot of infections trigger Reiter's syndrome in humans but I am not aware of Reiter's being described in animals. Interestingly the closest thing to Reiter's in animals is a disease produced by making rodents transgenic for one particular human HLA allele - B27. And of course ankylosing spondylitis is not just unique to humans it is pretty much unique to humans carrying HLA-B27.

The problem about asking vets is that most of them make diagnoses on the hoof (so to speak) on the basis of even less evidence than physicians. No animal is likely to go through all the tests needed to exclude other causes of whatever PEM might look like in that species.

One or two vets are very astute about pathogenesis. David Bennett took an interest in autoimmune rheumatic disease and studied lupus in certain breeds of dog - but because lupus is only found in one or two breeds. Most dogs never get it.

 

But I think the evidence shows that this does not turn out to be relevant. The best known chronic sequel of infection in humans in Reiter's and only a small percentage of even humans appear to have the immune equipment necessary to generate the illness. Similarly, I believe it is now considered that 90% or so of humans are incapable of getting multiple sclerosis. You have to have certain gene alleles even to have a chance of getting it.

My understanding is that a lot of the chronic conditions involving immune and nervous systems in humans relate to built in 'bugs' in complex regulatory software and are specific to our species and most often to genetic subsets of our species only.

It is also highly likely that some of these chronic illnesses have survived in humans because of our social support network. If they occurred de novo in wild animal populations the negative survival impact would be likely to clear them from the population in a few generations. In the days when I modelled disease causation I reckoned that for diseases with a mixed polygenic/stochasitc aetiology, which applies to a lot of autoimmune disease the tolerated rate for a chronic illness would be likely to be no more than 1:1000 to 1:200 in humans. For wild animal species I think it would be less so pretty hard to find. Diseases tend to get recognised in domestic animals when they have been bred in to inbred pedigree populations - like hip dysplasia in labradors and lupus in King Charles spaniels.

 

Horses apparently get something like ME, but it's hard to ask them about PEM, etc. It could just be overtraining or post-viral fatigue.

 

I'm sure this has been posted somewhere else already but seems relevant to the title of this thread -

https://www.healthrising.org/blog/2022/05/11/mouse-model-chronic-fatigue-syndrome-simmaron/