Mady Hornig on ME/CFS in Columbia University Magazine

[Cort]

Hornig goes over the results from the latest study and then talks about the current study. It looks like a good one!

• http://magazine.columbia.edu/explorations/spring-2015/new-hope-those-chronic-fatigue-syndrome

Hornig and her colleagues are now conducting follow-up studies to see if measuring cytokine levels is, in fact, useful in making diagnoses. In one study, they are following people with chronic fatigue syndrome over the course of a year or more in hopes of spotting distinct patterns in the fluctuations of their cytokine levels.

I imagine that this is a big study and that means if the results are validated they'll be very powerful. I imagine they're looking at everything they can. I don't think anyone has followed patients over a year.

It's nice to get the word spread in a major University magazine. She ends it by saying

The scientists are also optimistic that their discovery may eventually lead to the development of new treatments for chronic fatigue syndrome; the only treatments currently available are drugs that have been approved for other purposes and which physicians prescribe offlabel to target a person’s symptoms.
Regardless of the clinical impact this research may have, Hornig says that her latest discovery ought to give peace of mind to anyone who, in suffering from chronic fatigue, has felt intuitively that something was wrong with his or her body but was told otherwise by a physician.

“Patients are often left wondering why they’re not getting better, the implication being that maybe they’re not trying hard enough and pulling up on the old bootstraps,” she says. “But this is not a problem of a person’s will to get better. This is a biological disease.”