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Robert Naviaux' Lab - News - from 2019 onwards

Discussion in 'ME/CFS research news' started by Ron, Dec 21, 2019.

  1. FMMM1

    FMMM1 Senior Member (Voting Rights)

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    Sorry for suggesting that the answer to everything is a GWAS study. I didn't even know what a GWAS study was until @Simon M did an article on Chris Pointing's proposed application (now an application?) for funding for a GWAS study in ME!

    Anyway, has there been GWAS study in ASD and if so did they turn up anything linked to "purinergic signalling"?
     
    Michelle likes this.
  2. Sid

    Sid Senior Member (Voting Rights)

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    There was. I'm still waiting for that paper to see the light of day. I figure it might never.
     
    Michelle, merylg, Simon M and 6 others like this.
  3. Ron

    Ron Established Member (Voting Rights)

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    Why don't you also ask OMF or the Ron Davis group why there not concerned about it not being published since they put up the million dollars to fund it. Maybe they can give you better insight? Just a thought.
     
    Sing, merylg, Graham and 5 others like this.
  4. boolybooly

    boolybooly Senior Member (Voting Rights)

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    IMHO We need multiple labs trying to identify the blood factor which is why I backed the Prusty fundraiser and hope the OMF will do their own nanoneedle investigations.

    What we dont need is people assuming what it is going to be.
     
    Michelle, Simon M, Milo and 3 others like this.
  5. Jaybee00

    Jaybee00 Senior Member (Voting Rights)

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    From a recent email exchange with Robert Naviaux...some comments about the cause of MECFS.


    I posted the Lawson et al. paper here.

    https://www.s4me.info/threads/eleva...ue-syndrome-patients-lawson-et-al-2016.16760/

    Here is a link to the CFS page on his web site.

    https://naviauxlab.ucsd.edu/science-item/chronic-fatigue-syndrome-research/
     
    Michelle, Webdog, AliceLily and 28 others like this.
  6. adambeyoncelowe

    adambeyoncelowe Senior Member (Voting Rights)

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    @Jonathan Edwards You previously suggested a problem with housekeeping processes too.

    This might explain, e.g., unrefreshing sleep. The body isn't clearing away all those signals that have built up through the day, so they remain for the next day, and the day after that, and the day after that...

    It might also explain cumulative PEM, in that the symptoms caused by exertion from yesterday get added to today's, and then tomorrow's, and so on.

    The prolonged recovery time and need for regular rest might be the body trying to manage those housekeeping functions in drips and drabs over the longer term. Pacing, therefore, would allow space and time to reset those things.

    I'm not sure about the mitochondrial stuff yet, without having seen the evidence, but the general theory of ME as a failure of housekeeping seems like it makes sense.
     
  7. InitialConditions

    InitialConditions Senior Member (Voting Rights)

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    This sort of concept would really describe my experience. Everything from lactic acid buildup, to problems with brain processing (possibly related to glymphatic system?), to the sleep disfunction.
     
  8. Andy

    Andy Committee Member

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    The question that comes to my mind is whether this theory could account for the swapping of plasma(?) that patient-to-control inflicted impairment and control-to-patient cleared it, at least when measured by the nano-needle? (I'm very foggy this morning so if I've mixed anything up there let me know).

    If I do have the details right, could it be the raised ATP that the nano-needle is sensing? And/or if raised extra-cellular ATP is a 'danger' signal, then it could explain the immediate effect of swapping the medium that, in patients, it is presumably in. And could immunoadsorption/plasmapheresis, as an unintended side effect be removing ATP? I'll freely admit I don't have the scientific knowledge to know if these are stupid questions or not. :)
     
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  9. Kitty

    Kitty Senior Member (Voting Rights)

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    It would certainly be useful to study responses to extracellular ATP in detail, if it's possible to do so. It sounds like a really interesting area of research – at least to those of us who don't know enough to understand it!
     
  10. andypants

    andypants Senior Member (Voting Rights)

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    From 2003, but this abstract summarizes some of the ways extracellular ATP works particularly in connection with the nervous system. From the article
    Extracellular ATP and Neurodegeneration.

     
  11. Robert 1973

    Robert 1973 Senior Member (Voting Rights)

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    From the Naviaux’s website:
    As a non-scientist patient this makes sense to me as a possible explanation for how I feel. What I am not clear about is how much is conjecture and how much is established scientific fact. Have Naviaux’s findings which suggest that ME/CFS is a “dauer-like metabolic syndrome” been replicated?

    Also, I hadn’t picked up on the suggestion that a dauer-like state would slow the biological clock before, but it is consistent with the observation that others have made (see this thread) that people with ME, and particularly severe ME, often seem to look much younger than their real age.

    I don’t know if it is relevant but when my metabolic age* was tested by the ME Biobank it was 25 years younger than my actual age (the same age as I was when my illness began). Does anyone know if there is any published data on the relative metabolic ages of people with ME/CFS?

    *From https://tanita.eu/help-guides/understanding-your-measurements/:
    If people with ME (or a subgroup) have a much lower metabolic age than their actual age this would surely tell us something useful as it is the opposite of what one would expect from those who are inactive for other reasons.

    If there is subgroup of people with ME with a relatively low metabolic age and a subgroup with a high metabolic age, it would clearly be necessary to look at the distribution of the data rather than simply calculating the mean relative difference between metabolic and actual age in patients v controls.
     
    Last edited: Sep 11, 2020
  12. Marky

    Marky Senior Member (Voting Rights)

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    "If ME/CFS is truly like dauer6, then the biological clock of aging is slowed during illness7, but in a perverse twist of medical fate, without relief from long-term disabling symptoms."

    This sounds like nonsense to me

    Should do more research before all these crazy theories
     
  13. butter.

    butter. Senior Member (Voting Rights)

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    raised extracelullar atp and mtdna are a definite in me/cfs. I have a limited understanding, that little what I have is telling me that is really bad news.
     
    alktipping likes this.
  14. Amw66

    Amw66 Senior Member (Voting Rights)

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    Interesting.
    We did the ATP profile test by Acumen.
    I know that it has not been replicated.

    However.
    It was spooky for its correlation with severity.
    It also looked at translocator function ( atp out and atp in)

    My daughter was chucking ATP out in bucket loads
     
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  15. Hutan

    Hutan Moderator Staff Member

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    I'm not sure that is all hanging together. 'The biological clock of ageing is slowed' - One researcher found telomeres were abnormally shortened in people with ME - I'm not sure I believe that either, but it would be a sign of the opposite - biological aging advanced.

    https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/8361073/
    If this paper is correct, the decrease in BMR (in healthy people) with age has a lot to do with muscle mass. How was your metabolic age measured @Robert73? Perhaps it wasn't really a measure of what your metabolism is doing, which would be interesting, but actually just a measure of muscle mass? (Which is still interesting, as in, 'how could you retain so much muscle mass with a sedentary lifestyle?', but it's a different question.)
     
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  16. Robert 1973

    Robert 1973 Senior Member (Voting Rights)

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    The ME Biobank use a Tanita machine for calculating BMR (see: https://tanita.eu/help-guides/understanding-your-measurements/basal-metabolic-rate/). I've no idea how accurate or useful it is. I'm guessing that if low metabolic age had been a common observation in people with ME, and was deemed to be significant, the Biobank would have published something about it by now, but I will ask.

    I've managed to find a copy of my results. My ages was incorrectly entered as 34 instead of 43 but that doesn't change the calculation and everything else is correct.

    tanita.jpg
     
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  17. Snow Leopard

    Snow Leopard Senior Member (Voting Rights)

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    Almost all of it is conjecture. We are well-justified in being skeptical.
     
  18. Midnattsol

    Midnattsol Moderator Staff Member

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    Tanita scales is somewhat known to be unreliable, at least their lower-end models.
    They measure your body composition by using "bioimpedance", a small electric current is sent through the body, and the resistance it meets is then used to calculate how much fat, muscle (and organs, this is "fat free mass", I'm not sure if the model here subtracts some standard weight of your organs to give you the weight of your muscle) and bone you have as these different body tissue have different ability to transport electric currents.

    The algorhitm used to turn the resistance measurements into fat/protein/bone can change the results of the test, on many weights you can chose between being "active"/"muscular" or "standard", this changes the algorhitm and can give very different results. They may not be applicaple to pwME. Water retention could increase your protein% (muscle is recognized as having lower resistance than fat due to its high er water content) and is an easy way to get a better result than what you actually have.

    Calculating "biological age" based on these measurements is mostly just for fun. Especially if you don't fit into the algorhitm the weight uses to calculate its results.

    Besides that, I think its interesting. Though I'd be more worried about increased biological aging (the shortened telomeres @Hutan mentioned, increased oxidative stress, reduced "clean-up" of other stuff..) re people looking younger than their age - I've always done that. Not exposing your skin to all kinds of weather all the time could reduce signs of aging on the face, many pwME are less outdoors for obvious reasons. I'd say low activity could reduce certain byproducts of daily living that would also accumulate and be part of the process we call aging, but then there's the disease process that might change this. Which I guess is what we're discussing :p
     
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  19. Robert 1973

    Robert 1973 Senior Member (Voting Rights)

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    That is what I thought but I’ve not managed to follow the research as closely as I would like and I wondered if I had missed something.

    It is very frustrating and concerning to me when scientists present conjecture (and in some cases falsehoods) as facts. I don’t know if this happens more in ME research than other areas of medical research but it is deeply unhelpful.

    Yes, although, from a research point of view, it would be a mistake to discount a counterintuitive result because it isn’t worrying in itself. The question is whether it can tell us anything useful about the condition.


    If research confirmed the observation that a significant number of people with ME (and particularly severe ME) look much younger than their age, it would be interesting to know why. Images of people who have been confined indoors for other reasons (eg Julian Assange, Terry Waite) make me question whether being indoors, inactive and under a lot of stress would be likely to make someone look younger. Similarly, my observations of people who have been unwell for a long time with other types of illness is that having a severely debilitating chronic illness is more likely to make someone look older, not younger.

    I’m not suggesting that the observation is necessarily correct or that it couldn’t be explained by something secondary but, as with so much about ME, I would be interested to know more.
     
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  20. Sly Saint

    Sly Saint Senior Member (Voting Rights)

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