Is severe ME/CFS caused by an ongoing retrovirus infection ?

SerendipityCat:

Lillestrøm Health Clinic in Norway researching ME/CFS and retroviruses:

Exciting hypothesis

According to the project description, the hypothesis to be studied are:

“Patients with severe, disabling ME/CFS have an
ongoing MLV-related virus infection that is the main
reason for their disease.

Close relatives may or may not also have a latent
retroviral infection.

We want to look further info differences between
extremely disabled patients, healthy relatives, and
healthy controls in retroviral prevalence.


We will also look into markers for immune
dysfunction including cytokine profiles, and also
antibody detection.

We believe it is possible to find biomarkeds that can
be used to follow the disease.

We believe it is possible that the retroviral reservoir
is the B cells. This can explain the positive effect of
rituximab.

Mature B cells expressing the CD20 will then have to
carry the major retroviral load.

However, as immature B cells emerge from stem
cells in the bone marrow and plasma cells, the
increasing retroviral load contributes to the
increasing symptoms reappering as the effect of
rituximab lessens over time.”

The project is approved by the Regional comitte for
research ethics in medicine in Norway