Increased Resting Energy Expenditure in the Chronic Fatigue Syndrome, 2011, Watson et al

Increased Resting Energy Expenditure in the Chronic Fatigue Syndrome
Walter S. Watson, Donald C. McMillan, Abhijit Chaudhuri, Peter O. Behan

Abstract
It has been suggested that resting energy expenditure may be raised in chronic fatigue syndrome due to an upregulation of transmembrane ion transport. We measured resting energy expenditure by indirect calorimetry in 11 women with chronic fatigue and in 11 healthy women. Total body potassium, by whole body counting, and total body water, extracellular water and intracellular water, by a bioelectrical impedance method, were also measured.

When individual resting energy expenditure was predicted on the basis of total body potassium values for the chronic fatigue group, 5 out of 11 of these subjects had resting energy expenditure above the upper limit of normal as defined by the control group data. This is consistent with the hypothesis that there is upregulation of the sodium-potassium pump in chronic fatigue syndrome.

Link (Journal of Chronic Fatigue Syndrome) [Paywall]

 

Sci-Hub: https://sci.bban.top/pdf/10.1300/J092v04n04_02.pdf

 

It's a bit hard for me to follow, but I think in essence, they found that there was a strong correlation between potassium and resting energy expenditure in healthy controls. (black dots, n = 11, r = 0.89, p = 0.0003). They also found that CFS group seemed to be significantly higher than the predicted regression line, with five participants out of eleven higher than 2 standard deviations above the mean of the controls in terms of distance from that line.




They also did not find a significant difference in the raw energy expenditure values between the groups.

So energy expenditure in CFS is higher than one would expect based on a person's total body potassium, which is a good predictor of EE in healthy people.

I checked the data from the deep phenotyping study to see if it matches, and it doesn't seem to replicate this, though I'd welcome someone to make sure I didn't interpret this incorrectly.

There does not appear to be a strong correlation of energy expenditure to potassium in controls:


And energy expenditure normalized to potassium doesn't seem to be higher in ME/CFS:

Mann-Whitney test p-value = 0.58

Edit: See next post.

 

Okay, this study is using total body potassium, which I don't think would actually correlate well with the plasma potassium measured in the NIH study (I assume that's what the potassium test was, found in the "clinical master labs" dataset. Only 2% of TBK is plasma potassium. So ignore my analysis of the NIH study above. I don't think it has the data to test this.

 

Another study did report that in paraplegia, energy expenditure has an even stronger correlation with total body potassium than it does with fat free mass (0.86 vs 0.80):