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The reasoning was more that if vasopressin is reduced, it would likely result in more frequent complaints of polyuria in ME/CFS, and I was wondering if we have any good data on this. I know it's reported (think it's mentioned in the ICC also), but it never really stood out to me among the...

Yeah was thinking the same. Perhaps the most interesting things happened before those fatigue blocks in ME/CFS patients. Think the experiment is interesting, but with only 15 patients and so many tests, it's hard to make conclusions. Would be interesting to see how other controls, such as...

So muscle problems didn't appear as a separate cluster in their analysis of symptoms, so they think these act like "bridge symptoms" connecting some of the symptom domains. The main idea seems to be that if symptoms correlate with each other, then that suggests a shared underlying mechanism...

Useful overview, thanks. I'm not aware that polyuria (high urine output) is a common or notable problem in ME/CFS. Does anyone know any survey data on this? Perhaps it's easily overlooked given the many other symptoms and problems ME/CFS patients have. In this paper, approximately 50% of...

Was reading this 2025 paper with whole-genome sequencing data from more than 300.000 people in the UK Biobank. Adding confounders had little effect on the heritability estimates for most traits, except for educational attainment and fluid intelligence. Source: Estimation and mapping of the...

The data for their primary analysis with multiple ethnicities is quite hard to find but I believe it's this one here (GCST90838616): https://www.ebi.ac.uk/gwas/studies/GCST90838616

Applying the human brain atlas analysis by Duncan et al. 2025 to this fibromyalgia GWAS I got the following results: I expected similar results to ME/CFS because several genes (RABGAP1L, HTT, DCC, OLFM4) come up in both GWAS, but the pattern in this cell type is quite different. Instead of...

The authors note similarity to DecodeME results: HTT and DCC also came up in DecodeME, although just below the significance threshold.

They also did tissue enrichment using GTEx and also found that only central nervous system had significant hits. The panel on the right is from the PanSci mouse Atlas which I hadn't heard of before. Perhaps something to try out with DecodeME as well. They write:

Now published in Nature Medicine: https://www.nature.com/articles/s41591-026-04492-6

Both also came up in DecodeME even though it used very different sampling compared to the ICD-codes used in this fibromyalgia GWAS. I hope the publication means, that they will share the summary data in the GWAS Catalog.

Maybe its also a different interpretation of the term 'relapse'? To me that suggests frequent oscillation between good and bad periods like in multiple sclerosis or in depression. When it comes to prognosis I've seen/heard multiple trajectories including people whose decline was gradually or...

I wrote to the editors in january 2025 raising similar issues. And they said they would look into it but nothing happened. Hope it will be different this time.

Can I ask why you would put so much emphasis on relapses? I know it was a prominent feature in old ME descriptions but not sure if they are an essential aspect of ME/CFS. Is there data showing that relapses are characteristic of ME/CFS compared to other diseases?

Just speculating but from an evolutionary perspective the advantage of experiencing symptoms such as fatigue and malaise was probably to keep the organism still and quiet - to conserve energy or avoid pathogens from spreading. So if the animal pushes against this signal and remains active, it...

Yes I think both might play a role. These studies weren't randomized so you have multiple factors that can influence the results such as placebo effects, response bias, regression to the mean, etc.

Except that we might now have a good indication of where the magic is happening and what we need to investigate to understand how it works.

Thanks, would be good to have more discussion about this and an overview of arguments pro and contra. I've tried to reply to your points below. BTN2A1 also featured prominently in GWAS on anxiety (see here and here) while OMFL4 was one of the pleiotropic genes associated with multiple...

Yes this is one of the ME/CFS Lines consortium funded by the Dutch research agency ZonMw. It's part of the Dutch research agenda on ME/CFS. More about this study here: https://projecten.zonmw.nl/en/project/post-exertional-malaise-starting-point-investigate-and-understand-mecfs

Couldn't it be as straightforward as PD and MS having a different pathology that activates the central fatigue pathway, while ME/CFS might not. So in the latter the pathology might be in the neural network itself?