A Test For Chronic Fatigue Syndrome

By Nathan Collins Chronic Fatigue Syndrome affects one million Americans, according to recent estimates. Yet there's no reliable lab test for the illness, and researchers are still struggling to understand why and how the disease develops. That situation may soon improve, as researchers have found key disruptions in the immune systems of patients who've had Chronic Fatigue Syndrome fewer than three years, a discovery that could open the door to new tests and more individually tailored treatments for the debilitating illness. "Over 70 percent of patients have a delay in diagnosis of at least a year" and sometimes a decade, says Mady Hornig, lead author of the new study and an associate professor of epidemiology at Columbia University's Mailman School of Public Health. That's partially because diagnosing Chronic Fatigue Syndrome—more properly known as myalgic encephalomyelitis, or ME/CFS—is usually a matter of tracking specific symptoms and ruling out a variety of other, more easily identified disorders. Now, Hornig and her collaborators have discovered specific differences in blood samples taken from patients still in the early phases of the disease compared with other patients and healthy people. That suggests "there may be hope for early diagnosis," she says. That optimism stems from two separate studies on a total of 298 people with ME/CFS and 348 healthy individuals. Of that ME/CFS test group, 52 patients had had the disease fewer than three years. Because diagnose...
Source: Healthy Living - The Huffington Post - Category: Consumer Health News Source Type: news