There is no chronic fatigue virus – this is a medical fact
Doctors have proved that the virus is not associated with chronic fatigue syndrome
In recent years, doctors have recorded a rapid increase in the number of patients suffering from chronic fatigue syndrome. Most patients suffer from a common set of symptoms, including frequent cramps, insomnia, fatigue and headaches. Judy Mikovits from the Whittemore and Peterson Research Institute and her colleagues published an article in 2009 in which they described the effect of the XMRV virus affecting mice on the human body.
The symptoms of infection with the virus resembled chronic fatigue syndrome, which allowed Mikowitz and her colleagues to assume that he is the cause of this disease. Subsequent studies could not unequivocally confirm the relationship between the virus and the syndrome, and therefore the authors of the article withdrew it from the journal Science in December 2011.
A group of doctors led by Ian Lipkin from Columbia University in New York (USA), which included many of the authors of the 2009 article, finally put an end to this hypothesis by not detecting the virus in blood samples of several hundred sick and healthy people.
"We decided to go further than our colleagues and conducted a study in which we tried to determine once and for all whether we could find traces of the virus in the blood of people with chronic fatigue syndrome and healthy citizens," Lipkin explained.
To do this, scientists turned to several clinics located in six US states and formed a group of 147 volunteers with chronic fatigue syndrome who did not suffer from mental disorders and diseases of the nervous system, had viral infections in the past and had all the generally accepted symptoms of the disease. A similar number of healthy people acted as a control group.
Lipkin and his colleagues collected blood samples from their wards and analyzed them for the presence of virus particles or its genes inside cells. During the experiments, scientists did everything possible to prevent errors and discrepancies – each sample was checked several times and compared with obviously "infected" and "clean" samples.
It turned out that none of the volunteers were infected with the XMRV virus, although doctors found antibodies reacting to particles of this pathogen in the blood of nine healthy people and nine sick volunteers. However, the immune response to XMRV particles cannot be considered a trace of infection, since there are many antibodies in our body that can bind to dozens of virus strains.
"I am very grateful for the opportunity to participate in this unprecedented research. And although I am upset that we have not found a relationship between the XMRV virus and chronic fatigue syndrome, our work in 2009 was still able to play a positive role – we revived interest in studying the syndrome at the global level. I plan to continue working with leaders in the field of pathogen discovery to identify the cause of this disease," Mikowitz concludes.
Portal "Eternal youth" http://vechnayamolodost.ru18.09.2012