Research highlights:
- As a group, CFS patients have higher brain ventricular lactate, more abnormal spinal fluid results, lower brain GSH, and reduced cerebral blood flow relative to healthy sedentary controls
- Psychiatric comorbidity does not influence any of these potential biological markers of CFS
- 50% of the patients had more than one of these abnormalities
- The subgroup of patients with brain abnormalities may have an underlying encephalopathy producing their illness
Research abstract:
The purpose of this study was to investigate whether CFS patients without comorbid psychiatric diagnoses differ from CFS patients with comorbid psychiatric diagnoses and healthy control subjects in neuropsychological performance, the proportion with elevated spinal fluid protein or white cell counts, cerebral blood flow (CBF), brain ventricular lactate and cortical glutathione (GSH).
The results of the study did not show any differences in any of the outcome measures between CFS patients with and without psychiatric comorbidity, thus indicating that psychiatric status may not be an exacerbating factor in CFS.
Importantly, significant differences were found between the pooled samples of CFS compared to controls. These included lower GSH and CBF and higher ventricular lactate and rates of spinal fluid abnormalities in CFS patients compared to healthy controls.
Thirteen of 26 patients had abnormal values on two or more of these 4 brain-related variables. These findings, which replicate the results of several of our prior studies, support the presence of a number of neurobiological and spinal fluid abnormalities in CFS.
These results will lead to further investigation into objective biomarkers of the disorder to advance the understanding of CFS.
Multimodal and simultaneous assessments of brain and spinal fluid abnormalities in chronic fatigue syndrome and the effects of psychiatric comorbidity by Benjamin H Natelson, Xiangling Mao, Aaron J Stegner, Gudrun Lange, Diana Vu, Michelle Blate, Guoxin Kang, Eli Soto, Tolga Kapusuz, Dikoma C Shungu in Journal of the Neurological Sciences April 15, 2017 Vol 375, pp 411–416 [Published online Feb 2017]
