Using Plasma Autoantibodies of Central Nervous System Proteins to Distinguish Veterans with GWI from ... Controls. Abou-Donia, Klimas 2020 RETRACTED

RETRACTED - link to post
Full Title:
Using Plasma Autoantibodies of Central Nervous System Proteins to Distinguish Veterans with Gulf War Illness from Healthy and Symptomatic Controls

Gulf War Illness the main focus of the study but they had a control group of 50 people with ME/CFS

My bolding

https://www.mdpi.com/2076-3425/10/9/610

 

Question 1: what is GFAP?
Question 2: what relevance would elevated GFAP autoantibodies have & could that really be a biomarker (if the finding stacks up)?

Have only read the abstracts of the following.

https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0955067415000137

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6290896/

So it looks like:

1. GFAP are rather important to health.
2. Autoantibodies to GFAP are elevated in at least some other conditions and are already being used as a biomarker for a type of autoimmune astrocytopathy - this would seem to complicate their use as biomarker for ME?
3. Autoantibodies to GFAP are not causing any problems themselves but are a marker of "immune inflammation" (whatever that is but given it implicates astrocytes maybe it's another take on the nebulous "neuroinflammation"?).

 

Generally speaking, GWI sounds like it's mostly triggered by exposure to chemicals, whereas ME/CFS seems mostly triggered by infections, though it seems like there are some cases where the opposite has been true.

This makes me think that the thing that they may have in common is that something (not necessarily the same thing) is crossing the blood brain barrier and the illnesses are a result of the brain's immune system reacting to that.

Dr. Komaroff mentioned this possibility years ago when describing a 2005 study as showing:

He was referring to this 2005 study by James Baraniuk, et al.

Baraniuk, J.N., Casado, B., Maibach, H. et al. A chronic fatigue syndrome – related proteome in human cerebrospinal fluid. BMC Neurol 5, 22 (2005). https://doi.org/10.1186/1471-2377-5-22

https://bmcneurol.biomedcentral.com/articles/10.1186/1471-2377-5-22

*PGI stands for "Persian Gulf Illness."

 

This makes a lot of sense. The Countess of Mar’s trigger was chemicals too, sheep dip, I believe.

 

This paper has been retracted, 29 July 2024.

Pubpeer

Retraction notice

"The Brain Sciences Editorial Office retracts the article “Using Plasma Autoantibodies of Central Nervous System Proteins to Distinguish Veterans with Gulf War Illness from Healthy and Symptomatic Controls” [1], cited above.

Following publication, concerns were brought to the attention of the Editorial Office by a representative from Duke University regarding the validity of the Western blots presented in Figures 1–3 of this publication [1].

Adhering to our complaints procedure, an investigation was conducted by the Editorial Office and Editorial Board. Based on the review by Duke University of the article’s findings, the co-authors have requested a retraction due to concerns about their ability to rely on the Western blot images and produce verified, reliable results.

The Editorial Board evaluated the correspondence from the authors and the Institution and decided to retract this article [1], as per MDPI’s retraction policy (https://www.mdpi.com/ethics#_bookmark30, accessed on 28 May 2024) and in line with the Committee on Publication Ethics retraction guidelines (https://publicationethics.org/retraction-guidelines, accessed on 28 May 2024).

This retraction was approved by the Editor-in-Chief of the journal Brain Sciences.
The authors agreed to this retraction."