Community Symposium on the Molecular Basis of ME/CFS Sept 5 (Stanford/Ron Davis)

forestglip said:
I don't know about the two specific people in the images, but in the demographic data screenshot for all 13 women, for the multidimensional fatigue inventory (MFI) score it says 86.62 for cases and 32.08 for controls.

From a paper:
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So moderate/severe disease then? That's good in a way. Less chance of having some people who have idiopathic chronic fatigue in there.

Interesting that the controls scored so higly for fatigue - were they sedentary controls, and did they have another disease that might cause fatigue?
 
Did anyone happen to grab screenshots from Rob Phair’s slides. I would be interested in revisiting some of them. Specifically the table showing different TCA metabolites since I would like to check which ones were not measured and in which direction the difference from controls was
 
jnmaciuch said:
Did anyone happen to grab screenshots from Rob Phair’s slides. I would be interested in revisiting some of them. Specifically the table showing different TCA metabolites since I would like to check which ones were not measured and in which direction the difference from controls was
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Jaime Selzer posted several screenshots from his talk on Bluesky, but I think you need to be logged in to see. Is this the one:

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I am still peering at these images and there are things that are hard to explain. That may be good or bad. I think haemopoietic marrow may be making more of a contribution than I first thought. The granular/blobby nature suggests lymph nodes but the distribution is odd. You might think these were muscles but I cannot make that work because muscles overlap so much and are more evenly linear.

An odd thing is the blank space around the lower thigh and knee are on the patient scans not present on the controls. The cut off at the bottom of the high signal in the inguinal region is very strange.

I wonder how much more resolution there is in these images or whether what we see now is the best we can get.

I also just slightly wonder whether enthesis (ligament attachment) is contributing. Enthesis is the main target organ for ank spond. But I don't think there is a sacro-iliac signal here.
 
Jonathan Edwards said:
An odd thing is the blank space around the lower thigh and knee are on the patient scans not present on the controls. The cut off at the bottom of the high signal in the inguinal region is very strange.
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Just looked at them in Photoshop, and the missing bits are odd—must be some kind of artefact of the technique or the scanner? The ankles of the 50-year-old control are also missing on the 2D scan.
 
It is a bit of a worry that the images we are seeing now are maybe the same as in December 2023. If this was really showing a consistent difference one might have hoped for more detailed analysis of what the patterns meant by now. That may be available in upcoming publication but so far I am still puzzled as to exactly what we are looking at.

I would be interested in @SNT Gatchaman 's take on these pictures.
 
There do seem to be concentrations around the shoulder girdle, the pelvis, and the top of the thigh bone.

Is that where you'd expect to find concentrations of those bone marrow cells? Or to put it a different way, are there areas of marrow you'd expect to light up that are missing?
 
forestglip said:
Screenshots of the data from the full body scans with the TSPO tracer:

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34 year old case and 36 year old control
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51 year old case and 50 year old control
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Edit: Added labels above PET images.
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Seeing the actual bar plots, I am not convinced this data presents a case for lymph node specificity. What that figure shows is overall higher signal in every site with the exception of liver and parotid [edit: triceps and spleen], and the few that were significant just seem to be a slightly higher difference in mean or less intragroup variability overall.

Also, was there additional evidence pointing to quadriceps? It wasn’t significant in this figure so I am wondering what prompted their specific mention in the presentation.
 
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jnmaciuch said:
What that figure shows is overall higher signal in every site with the exception of liver and parotid, and the few that were significant just seem to be a slightly higher difference in mean or less intragroup variability overall.
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I assumed the bar plot shows fewer than all the tissues/organs they looked at, and they just picked and chose the tissue groups and bones where there appears to be a pattern (even if not quite significant in some), plus three organs just to demonstrate that it's not high everywhere. Would they not have tested lower leg, lower arm, chest, and all the other bones etc at the same time?

jnmaciuch said:
Also, was there additional evidence pointing to quadriceps? It wasn’t significant in this figure so I am wondering what prompted their specific mention in the presentation.
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I think she was just talking about the general quad area being strikingly more lit up in the visuals.
 
forestglip said:
I assumed the bar plot shows fewer than all the tissues/organs they looked at, and they just picked and chose the tissue groups and bones where there appears to be a pattern (even if not quite significant in some), plus three organs just to demonstrate that it's not high everywhere. Would they not have tested lower leg, lower arm, chest, and all the other bones etc at the same time?
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Yes that’s what I was wondering too, I’d like to see every site they tested for that reason. Though even of the ones here that were significant or at least showing a stronger trend, they’re not all lining up with a lymph node story.
 
Kitty said:
It's not at all what I expected to see for muscle, it stops at the top of the thigh like a pair of shorts. The drop-off in signal is quite rapid as you move down through where the quad muscles are.
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Based on the bar plots I am guessing that there was probably a lot of variability across all the participants, so the two representative images might not be particularly representative
 
jnmaciuch said:
Based on the bar plots I am guessing that there was probably a lot of variability across all the participants, so the two representative images might not be particularly representative
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Yeah, I wondered that. It'd be really useful to see more of the actual paired scans, including ones where the person with ME/CFS shows a less clear-cut pattern.
 
Another random thought: odd that it didn't replicate for men.

That could be to do with selection, or availability of well-matched cases and controls, but in a way it gives me confidence there's something here that needs explaining.
 
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