IIMEC 2023: Maureen Hanson

IIMEC15 08 Professor Maureen Hanson 15th Invest in ME Research International ME Conference 2023

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=a3hzSSQkW5c

29 minutes

Terrific presentation from Professor Maureen Hanson including some unpublished work

I think we are getting close to some real answers - exhausted t-cells, abnormal classical monocytes. The technology is there now for looking at each type of cell, identifying the surface markers and the RNA inside them.

Things seem to be pointing to latent infections.

 

So those of us without a clear infectious onset may have had an asymptomatic infection, or have seemingly recovered from an infection but accumulated damage over time causing us to gradually decline in health over months/years..?

 

Not sure if you've had a chance to watch the video yet, @Midnattsol, but Maureen sets up her talk very nicely around your point about asymptomatic infections. She cites some research on people who were tested for Covid-19 very regularly. The majority of people actually had an asymptomatic infection! And there were some people who were pre-symptomatic at the time of their positive test and only developed symptoms later.

But if the problem in fact is a virus that has become latent, EBV or something like that, perhaps it just takes some sort of stressor to activate it.

Maureen isn't claiming to know, it's just that there is accumulating evidence to support the idea of the immune system dealing with a chronic viral infection.

 

I will watch it later An example of commenting without having looked at the content

I look forward to having the asymptomatic infection can cause long term consequences as a recognized fact, at least in the media over here the "experts" cited often only focus on those hospitalised.

I remember when I started to get sick and I was told it was "just mono" and it was typical to not get right back up again. Then I was actually tested and I didn't have antibodies to EBV. I then had a remission, where I would have to do A LOT to get PEM (I averaged 17-20k steps daily, was hiking in mountains more or less daily, biked everywhere), and when I crashed later I was tested again and this time I did have antibodies against EBV. I have wondered if that two-week-in-bed PEM crash I experienced was actually an infection. Since that crash I haven't had a period where I have been able to average 17k steps/day for a prolonged time.

Edit: I've seen cytomegalovirus being another potential source of a latent infection, and when I tested negative for EBV I did test positive for CMV. I could possibly have had an asymptomatic CMV infection as a newborn as there was an outbreak at the newborn ward when I was born. I say asymptomatic because my mother was very surprised when the test results came back positive for CMV.

 

This is making me miss cell biology now that I'm working with questionnaires instead of biological data. Though my work now is much more ME friendly than being in the lab

 

Occam's Razor, come on down.

 

I did not have fever or anything like that that I can remember, so it was either asymptomatic or that the infection was long before I started to notice I would feel terrible when doing stuff. It was just assumed I, especially as a teen, likely had had a recent EBV infection.

 

Well, not to get ahead of ourselves, it's just that those charts in Maureen's presentation looked compelling compared to the usual equivocal charts we see, and I trust her team's work more than many others.

We may need to find the pathogens, or at least know what is triggering immunological abnormalities, in order to know if an immune response needs to be ramped up to eliminate real pathogens, or whether, conversely, we need to dampen down an immune response to things that the body has confused with a problematic pathogen. I suppose the alternative approach is that we start clinical trials of things that might address one of those two options and see what happens. It's just possibly a bit risky.

For identifying pathogens, looking at post mortem tissue would probably be useful, as it would provide access to more than the usual blood and CSF e.g. brain, bone marrow, vagal nerve and other neurons, spleen, muscles, eyes. I think we need to get more organised about that. What else? Biopsies?