Hope for sufferers of chronic fatigue

By Roger Highfield

(Filed: 02/03/2006)

A drug that acts on the body's immune system offers a potential new way to treat chronic fatigue syndrome, according to research on biological effects of the disease.

The symptoms of chronic fatigue, which may affect as many as 240,000 people, have been compared to a bad hangover: weakness, inability to think straight, disrupted sleep and headache.

But some say it is the same as myalgic encephalomyelitis, or ME, and sufferers of the syndrome - CFS - have often received little sympathy from doctors, some of whom dismiss it as "all in the mind".

Last year, however, Dr Jonathan Kerr's team at St George's, University of London reported differences in the way genes are used in the white blood cells of people with the disease, in studies backed by the CFS Research Foundation.

Research presented at a meeting organised by the foundation last night provides further evidence that, in patients with well-defined symptoms, there are marked changes in how genes are regulated. And Dr Kerr said that, within a year, he will have made the first attempts to use drugs to treat the disease, based on the new
understanding of the metabolic pathways affected by the genes.

The team has found an existing drug - an unnamed "immunomodulatory drug" which has already been tested - that may act on the metabolic pathways that seems to underpin the changes in gene use. "We have been promised the drug by the drug company. We now need to get funding to start," Dr Kerr said.

The work also involves the development of a laboratory blood test, since it has discovered differences in blood proteins related to the changes in the use of genes.

Dr Kerr's team has also identified viruses that may perpetuate the disease, which fits with some current thinking that it results from a persistent infection. As a result, antiviral drugs may also be candidates for treatment, though Dr Kerr admitted that other factors are important, notably stress, which is known to affect immunity.
           (This news article first appeared In The Telegraph on 02/03/06. It is reproduced              with kind permission of the Telegraph Group LTD).