I think there's a lot to like about this study. It's worth clicking through to the
fuller explanation, which is still just a summary.
One thing is this - the Fred and Joan Davies Bequest. I haven't heard of it, but it is really lovely that people cared enough to donate money in a bequest.
This project is funded by ME Research UK with the financial support of the Fred and Joan Davies Bequest.
Also that MERUK description at the link is clear and you can choose to listen to it rather than read it.
At first I was worried that they would classify people on the basis of whether they had various autonomic (orthostatic, gastrointestinal) symptoms at one point in time. Symptoms change from day to day, so I thought the research might just get confounded by short term variation. But, they are tracking measures across two visits, before and after exercise and a standing test.
This is the question that Jente will be exploring in her PhD project. Over the course of two visits, she will assess a number of autonomic, clinical and biological measures in 75 people with ME/CFS and 15 healthy control subjects, before and after two procedures.
The first procedure is a bout of submaximal exercise on an exercise bike, in order to create a high-energy demand situation and stress the mitochondria. The second is an active standing test designed to stress the autonomic nervous system.
The data collected during these assessments will include measures of autonomic nervous system activity, mitochondrial dysfunction, and signs of mitochondrial DNA methyltransferase activity. Jente and the team will also assess the presence and severity of post-exertional malaise at 1 and 7 days after these procedures. She will then subgroup patients according to their autonomic phenotype, and analyse differences in mitochondrial dysfunction between these subgroups.
So perhaps they can identify some real differences. 75 people is a good sized study. And they are tracking PEM, so the study might tell us something about that. I like that they have a hypothesis about methyltransferase activity and will look for that.
I didn't see what sampling they would do, I assume it's a blood sample, so then what cells would they be looking at and are they active? Or maybe it's a muscle biopsy? That would be my main concern with this study - are they sampling the right cells, and are the procedures for measuring mitochondrial function good enough (e.g. measuring quickly enough after sample collection).
I also like that Jente fronted up to give a description of her project, and in English too, thank you. It would be great if she visited the forum, we have some other relatively young researchers investigating mitochondrial function already here.
