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Using Plasma Autoantibodies of Central Nervous System Proteins to Distinguish Veterans with GWI from Healthy and Symptomatic Controls. Abou-Donia 2020

Discussion in 'ME/CFS research' started by John Mac, Sep 5, 2020.

  1. John Mac

    John Mac Senior Member (Voting Rights)

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    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
     
    Hutan, Simbindi, Michelle and 12 others like this.
  2. Forbin

    Forbin Senior Member (Voting Rights)

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  3. Ravn

    Ravn Senior Member (Voting Rights)

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    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"?).
     
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  4. Forbin

    Forbin Senior Member (Voting Rights)

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    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."
     
    Last edited: Sep 8, 2020
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  5. It's M.E. Linda

    It's M.E. Linda Senior Member (Voting Rights)

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