Persistent fatigue induced by interferon-alpha: A novel, inflammation-based, proxy model of Chronic Fatigue Syndrome, 2018, Pariante et al

I think it was justified to try to make use of funding for CFS to look at the side effects of interferon alpha, as that provided a convenient sample of people they could look at in a controlled way.

Ideally they'd be able to do this sort of research on those coming down with something like EBV, but that would be extremely difficult to do as we don't know when people are going to come down with that (assuming we're not infecting people for the sake of our experiment).

I think that the basic idea of the experiment was fine and potentially interesting (although longer follow up was really needed), but then their weak results from a small sample of questionable relevance to CFS were hugely over-hyped.

 

That is why you recruit large numbers in a prospective study, such as the Dubbo study. You then track them for years.

 

Yes, but we still don't get biological measures of immune response immediately as infection begins.

 

ScienceAlert has 9 million followers on Facebook

 

Neuroscience News

https://neurosciencenews.com/chronic-fatigue-immune-10371/

 

Good summary from MEAction: - Post-interferon fatigue study - a mixed bag

 

There are some pretty bold statements in that ScienceAlert article:

 

Oh dear.

Sad, but not exactly shocking.

 

It's not -- those were two, separate groups in the study.

[Edit: I see @Michiel Tack already noted this! ]

 

My brother was having Hep C interferon treatment at the very time of my severe ME onset, same year. His exhaustion sounded similar to mine. I had full-blown ME (in a huge and overwhelming immunological storm) that would not dissipate. It took a good two years for that immunological storm to abate. I would never want to experience anything like that again. Very frightening to feel your immune system in such a volatile state.

Sorry I have only been able to skim some posts.

 

No.

Thanks, tried to synthesize a lot of what was being discussed.

 

Yes.

That's a considerable omission. What we're looking at, then, is people with a strong immune response to viruses or with a particularly severe viral infection and commensurate response.

Yes, maybe. Or perhaps what they have is a functional but sluggish immune response, such that when it finally 'kicks in', the response is pretty nuclear.

If only we had better research into genetics.

 

That is a logistical problem that can be solved. Its possible to track this within twenty four hours if you are prepared, but that would mean pre-existing responses set up, and that costs even more money. These issues are fixable, but the better the fix the more expensive it is, and therefore the harder it is to sell to grant bodies.

 

If this is a repeat, I apologise!

From LocalME;


https://steamtraen.blogspot.com/2018/12/have-scientists-found-explanation-for.html

"Thanks for posting that link V.
Prof Pariante did not make clear that this study was not about ME, but Jon Peters was very good and he pointed this out. He was also very good at pointing out there is a lot of other research finding biomedical abnormalities.

I haven't read the study myself, but there is a critique of the study in a blog article by Nick Brown, link below. The SMC was behind the publicity (who'd have guessed?)."


Some excerpts from Nick Brown's article:

"I was allowed in without a press pass after identifying myself as a researcher, but when I tried to get clarification of a point that had been made during the presentation I was told that only reporters (i.e., not researchers or other members of the public) were allowed to ask questions."

"There are many possible causes of fatigue, and I don't think that the authors have given us any good reason to believe that the fatigue that was reported by their hepatitis C patients six months after finishing an exhausting medical procedure that itself lasted for half a year or more was caused by the same mechanism (whatever that might be) as the multi-year ongoing fatigue in ME/CFS patients, especially since, for all we know, some or all of the 18 cases of persistent fatigue might have been only marginal (i.e., a small amount worse than baseline) or resolved themselves within not too many months."

"None of the eight-week or 12-week results appear in the article, and the two from the end of treatment are extremely unconvincingly argued (see previous paragraph). It is possible that the authors simply did not perform any tests on these results, but I am inclined to believe that they did run these tests and found not to provide support for their hypotheses."

"I don't find Russell et al.'s study to be very convincing. My guess is that different cytokine levels do not predict fatigue in either hepatitis C/IFN-α patients or ME/CFS patients, and that the purported relation between cytokine levels at four weeks into the IFN-α treatment and subsequent fatigue may well just be noise. In terms of explaining how ME/CFS begins, let alone how we might prevent or cure it, this study may not get us any closer to the truth."

 

Yup, shared in this thread already and Nick Brown has posted a couple of times as well.