Single Day Longitudinal Study

A growing body of literature suggests that energy, amino, and lipid metabolism are clearly implicated in the pathophysiology of Myalgic Encephalomyelitis / Chronic Fatigue Syndrome.

Although many studies have shown differences in several metabolites and lipids between ME/CFS and control populations, no single metabolite has been demonstrated to be consistently observed through these studies. This may be due to the high variability amongst ME/CFS patients both clinically and biologically speaking.

One way to overcome this is to conduct repeated measures study designs whereby numerous biological replicates are collected for each patient and control, allowing for each subject to act as their own control. This reduces sources of variation and controls for factors that cause variability between subjects, and is an important technique for research into highly variable or heterogenous populations like ME/CFS.

This study proposes to measure metabolites and lipid species using a novel, sophisticated repeated-measures study design. This will help elucidate the biological mechanisms driving ME/CFS symptoms, and works towards finding clinically useful diagnostic blood tests, and new treatment avenues for ME/CFS patients based on the underlying patho-biology.