Paper at <a href="https://www.pnas.org/content/pnas/early/2019/04/24/1901274116.full.pdf" rel="nofollow">https://www.pnas.org/content/pnas/early/2019/04/24/190127411...</a><p>Pleasantly surprised to discover that it was legally available!<p>The test appears to be <i>ridiculously</i> good. Perfect separation of 40 subjects into those who have been diagnosed with CFS and those who are known to be healthy, from blood samples.<p>I want to see this replicated, by people who are not the original authors; but if this test is anything like as good as it looks, it's revolutionary.
Journalists, this is quite the story. Here you have a bunch of really sick patients with docs around the world saying it's in there head. Then a UK study comes out (PACE) saying patients should engage in activity to help themselves. This only makes the patients worse and eventually so bad that the study was pulled.<p>In comes dr ron davis. His son acquired me cfs while traveling in india. Completely unsatisfied with the lack of care provided by his doctors, he ventured off to research the disease himself assembling a team of esteemed scientists. They all begin to promptly kick ass and take names making more headway on understanding the disease more than anytime in history. Meanwhile, they have open conferences which are posted on YouTube for patients to watch (and see hope) and other scientists to learn from.<p>Davis and his collaborators discover all sorts of cfs links and debunk a bunch of myths.really interesting research is occurring on trypanosomes, metabolic traps, and the microbiome. Eventually a large signal is found when the cells are stressed and voila, we arrive at the test mentioned in the link.<p>This folks is how science is supposed to unfold and it all happening right in front of our eyes for everyone to see in real time. Quite astonishing. These folks will eventually win the Nobel, im sure of it.
I'm just astonished by this.<p>Millions of people (in the US alone!) suffer from this illness and I think everyone has wondered, or heard it wondered, if it's imaginary.<p>For all these people to know there's something actually physically wrong with them is massive. It'll shift the thinking of everyone in the profession, of their families and friends and colleagues, and of themselves.<p>It's a huge, huge breakthrough.
This sounds brilliant if it can be replicated. From what I've read and heard large parts of the medical establishment still treats ME/CFS patients as lazy/making it up. For there to be a positive diagnosis rather than a diagnosis of exclusion is the first step to getting these people the help they deserve.
This looks very promising, but it’s too early to say how accurate this test truly will be. Even if this papers methodology is replicated and the test again perfectly selects ME/CFS from healthy controls, it may perform terribly when used in a real clinical setting where the test has to distinguish CFS from the spectrum of other disorders that it will encounter.<p>In other words while the current paper suggests the tests sensitivity is likely to be high it’s much harder to come to any conclusion about it’s real world specificity.
I had CFS like symptoms so bad I was stuck in bed for several years and the doctor basically would not help me. Eventually I decided to treat it myself with antibiotics and anti parasitic medication. I basically came to the conclusion that for my specific case I had an unknown blood parasite and the fatigue was being caused by neurotoxins. I don't think all CFS are caused by an infection but mine definitely was and I have my life back. If you a researcher looking for a cure, try to test medications that flush neurotoxins out to see if the disease goes away and then try figuring out what is creating them in the first place to treat them.
If you are living with CFS i recommend giving <a href="https://cfsremission.com/" rel="nofollow">https://cfsremission.com/</a> a look.
Why did they need machine learning? It seems from Figures 2B-G that there's a clear cut off.<p>"Moreover, to create a classifier for ME/CFS patients capable of identifying new patients, required for a robust diagnostic tool, we developed a trained kernel Support Vector Machine (SVM), a supervised machine-learning algorithm, using our experimental data. To classify new patients based on whether they fall to the right of the decision boundary, we initially selected the two features with the largest significance: change from the baseline to the plateau and change from the minimum to the plateau for the in-phase components of the impedance. Using these features, a cubic polynomial kernel SVM was able to classify the two populations, although the two features are highly correlated, as shown in Fig.2H."<p><a href="https://www.pnas.org/content/pnas/early/2019/04/24/1901274116.full.pdf" rel="nofollow">https://www.pnas.org/content/pnas/early/2019/04/24/190127411...</a>
Can anyone explain the idea of salt as a cell stressor?<p>> The idea is to stress the samples from both healthy and ill patients using salt, and then compare how each sample affects the flow of the electrical current.<p>Is this an osmotic pressure change that stresses the cytoskeleton or something? Does a cell under a hypertonic solution change its cell membrane channel’s behavior?
I have some doubts that this will be 100% specific to CFS, but as professor Davis said at this point it's important to demonstrate that these patients have something wrong with them.<p>Davis called this the last major disease we know almost nothing about. It's 2-3 as common as multiple sclerosis with worse impact on the person's life. It's also the most underfunded illness when the number of patients and the severity is taken into account.
Since poor sleep quality is a core symptom of CFS I can't help wonder if sleep is the underlying component. I think we've all underestimated the critical nature of sleep in immune, metabolic, stress, cognitive aspects, etc. It's also hard to self-assess the quality of your sleep, eg. clock-time at each phase, central apnea events, 02 saturation, noise/ light/ movement disturbances while you are asleep, etc.
There is something akin to a daily exertion limit in CFS. When patients exceed it, they have a relapse. It is very easy to have these relapses because the exertion limit is so low.<p>There must be a biological mechanism behind this limitation. It could be something to do with energy generation in cells and this test may be measuring the associated impairment.
There's a movie called "Unrest" which, in part, covers Dr Davis and his son I think. I thought it was a pretty interesting movie, it's on Netflix in the UK, not sure about elsewhere.
Ron Davis has worked on this day and night for years. I remember reading about his effort to figure out CFS to save his son. I'm not even sure this was his field of expertise. He just wanted to save his sons life and gave his every waking moment to try and figure it out. It makes me very happy that he seems to have accomplished it. I'm curious if his son is still with him, he was in really bad shape back in 2016.
My mom has this. While I'm hopeful this may lead to an effective treatment, it won't give her back the many years she's lived with the disease.
Off topic, but does anyone know why this post didn’t match up with my submission from last week [0]? I know scheme and querystring can throw it off. But in this case the links appear to be the same? Not sore about it, genuinely curious what the matching rules look like!<p>[0] <a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19783668" rel="nofollow">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19783668</a>
Look over at r/medicine about this topic.<p><a href="https://www.reddit.com/r/medicine/comments/blc7tv/stanford_laboratory_claims_to_identify_robust/" rel="nofollow">https://www.reddit.com/r/medicine/comments/blc7tv/stanford_l...</a><p>Doctors seem to be overly critical and ignorant. Any reason for this?
For the record, here’s a permalink that uses HTTPS: <a href="https://med.stanford.edu/news/all-news/2019/04/biomarker-for-chronic-fatigue-syndrome-identified.html" rel="nofollow">https://med.stanford.edu/news/all-news/2019/04/biomarker-for...</a>
YouTube talk about the same:
<a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bXGCQPLUtdQ" rel="nofollow">https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bXGCQPLUtdQ</a>
Medicine is a must for any empathetic society. However I wonder if the dawn of modern medicine was the end of natural human evolution.<p>Now that people with diseases such as CFS and diabetes can receive help, we are no longer breeding these diseases out of the gene pool. As a result, we are actually spreading them epigenetically over time.<p>We will be forced to turn to science, such as vaccines and pre- and post-birth biological modification, in order to continue the progression of our species in our battle against ailments and germs.<p>As a side note, what is the best way to get tested for CFS? Is it possible to devlop CFS after contracting certain immuno-suppressant diseases?<p>In my youth I was constantly sleeping in class, but I chalked it up to a combination of insomnia and 24/7 forced consumption of amphetamines to treat ADHD. I mean I would sleep literally <i>anywhere</i> if I had more than half an hour to kill with nothing to do, much to the embarrassment of my guardians. At the time I was not interested in getting tested for narcolepsy and adding yet another item to my list of mental illnesses.<p>Then right after high school, I contracted mononucleosis. I was completely bed-ridden for almost six months, and for about two years I basically had no energy at all. Always sleeping. Those two years went by in a flash. And now I still feel that to a degree, years later. I'm Bipolar II, and when I'm in my manic phase I have near unlimited energy, but when I'm at baseline or in my depressive phase I basically crawl into a permanent coma for two weeks punctuated by work.<p>A lot of people intentionally allow their children to contract mono in their youth, similarly to chicken pox, so that the virus comes at a more manageable period in their life. It can be devastating/disruptive to an adult life. I was homeless and unable to work for a long time. I wonder if any research has been done towards the link between early contraction of these diseases and CFS.