ME Research UK announce funding for "The effect of activated HERVs and the associated immune response in severe ME/CFS"

https://www.meresearch.org.uk/research/activated-hervs-and-immune-response/

 

Some sort of atypical autoimmune problems may well be going in ME, or in subgroups of ME, but calling them characteristic of ME seems to be overstating the current evidence.

As far as I can make out this study starts at step 2 of the above hypothesis, i.e. it asks the question if there is increased activation of HERVs in ME. It doesn't seem to address step 1, i.e. what is causing the epigenetic changes purportedly causing HERV activation. Has this been addressed in other studies already? Or are they working on the basis that if they find no HERV activation there's no point in looking for epigenetic changes, and if they do find HERV activation they can then look for epigenetic changes at that point?

Interesting cohort set-up, starting with comparing severe ME and FM rather than the usual HC.

 

I am very curious about the FM control group. There is a great deal of overlap between the 2 diseases, so one would have to ensure that the FM group is not either misdiagnosed or living with both, including PEM.

it is not unheard of that at the family practice level, physicians calls ME fibromyalgia due to the lack of knowledge.

 

I suspect #2 is probably significantly easier to do than #1, hence the reason for doing it that way around – though #1 may be a much more revealing question.

 

ME Research UK:


Dr Elisa Oltra at the Catholic University of Valencia has recently completed her ME Research UK-funded study looking at the link between HERVs and ME/CFS. She published early results from the study back in 2022:
https://www.meresearch.org.uk/research/persistent-herv-expression-in-patients-with-post-covid-symptoms/

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This is on a long Covid study that used ME Research UK funding; see:
https://www.meresearch.org.uk/human-endogenous-retroviruses-hervs-and-long-covid/

 

Not sure if this was posted before:
HERV activation segregates ME/CFS from fibromyalgia and defines a novel nosological entity for patients fulfilling both clinical criteria by Oltra et al https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2023.10.05.561025v1