HERV-K and HERV-W transcriptional activity in Myalgic Encephalomyelitis/ Chronic Fatigue Syndrome. Rodrigues et al. 2019

Discussion in 'ME/CFS research' started by John Mac, Jul 6, 2019.

  1. John Mac

    John Mac Senior Member (Voting Rights)

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    https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/693465v1?rss=1
     
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  2. InitialConditions

    InitialConditions Senior Member (Voting Rights)

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    I mean wow.... can't even get the acronym right: 'CFSMS' (!), 'CFS/ME' and 'ME/CFS' in the abstract alone. That's one way to put readers off.
     
    Last edited: Jul 7, 2019
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  3. Lucibee

    Lucibee Senior Member (Voting Rights)

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    Looks like this research is using some of the LSHTM CureME biobank samples.

    I've found some other articles that may put it into context wrt ME/CFS.

    One of the reasons for looking at this is that HIV seems to induce expression of HERV-K, particularly during active infection: https://retrovirology.biomedcentral.com/articles/10.1186/1742-4690-9-6
    "Increased HERV expression is often seen during carcinogenesis and in autoimmune diseases such as multiple sclerosis [2], but it is unclear whether the increased expression is a cause or consequence of the disease."

    ref 2 is this paper: Kurth, Bannert. Beneficial and detrimental effects of human endogenous retroviruses https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1002/ijc.24902
     
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  4. Mithriel

    Mithriel Senior Member (Voting Rights)

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    Why would HERVK be overexpressed in the moderately affected but not the severely affected? It just seems strange.
     
  5. Dolphin

    Dolphin Senior Member (Voting Rights)

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    True, though this is only at preprint stage. Hopefully most of such errors particularly in the abstract should go after it goes through peer review and editing.
     
  6. Hoopoe

    Hoopoe Senior Member (Voting Rights)

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    It seems to be a null result but the authors are trying to avoid that conclusion. This difference is just reaching the p=0.05 threshold. On other parameters the patients don't differ from controls.
     
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  7. Lucibee

    Lucibee Senior Member (Voting Rights)

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    I guess we'll have to wait for the whole paper, but my guess is that if HERV-K expression requires the presence of active viral replication from another agent (eg HIV), you might only see that in moderately affected patients because of the energy demands it places on cellular mechanisms.
     
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  8. Snow Leopard

    Snow Leopard Senior Member (Voting Rights)

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    Indeed. It could suggest that "moderate" and "severely" are two different diseases. Or that the results are null...
     
  9. wigglethemouse

    wigglethemouse Senior Member (Voting Rights)

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  10. rvallee

    rvallee Senior Member (Voting Rights)

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    Uh. Interesting!

    His Twitter bio:
    I can't wait until the people who want to tackle the toughest challenges understand this is one of the most interesting ones. So much potential to discover entire new areas of medicine. There's definitely a Nobel prize somewhere in the pipeline once we crack this egg.
     
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  11. wigglethemouse

    wigglethemouse Senior Member (Voting Rights)

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    Kris Fobes offered more info on his work in 7 replies in the same Twitter thread as above.
    https://twitter.com/user/status/1148985681139490816

    Just to add, isn't it cool that S4Me posts many interesting papers :)
     
    Last edited: Jul 11, 2019
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  12. Andy

    Andy Committee Member

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    Open access, https://autoimmunhighlights.biomedcentral.com/articles/10.1186/s13317-019-0122-8
     
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