Chronic Fatigue Syndrome Has Genetic Component

You're not just imagining it, CFS sufferers, and it's not just a hard-to-identify infection. The results of a study on a group of people in Wichita, Kansas with Chronic Fatigue Syndrome has proven that there are a number of genetic components to the illness.

A detailed WaPo story sums up an important finding in the research: "[T]hough [chronic fatigue] syndrome comes in many flavors,...experts said, the new work also points to an important common feature: The brains and immune systems of affected people do not respond normally to physical and psychological stresses."

CFS exacts a significant personal and economic toll. It's estimated that as many as one million people in the USA have the condition. The government believes that the typical family of a CFS sufferer loses about $20,000 a year in earnings and savings, due to missed work.

More good detail from the VoA, including chronic fatigue syndrome symptoms:

Chronic fatigue syndrome was first identified in the 1980s, but the cause has been elusive. It feels like several days without sleep, a flu-like condition that drains energy and is often accompanied by weakness, headaches, sore joints and lymph nodes, and impaired memory. Bed rest offers no cure. Women are diagnosed with it two-to-four times as often as men.

Some experts thought chronic fatigue syndrome might be something else, like mononucleosis, a virus, or an immune-system weakness. Others were skeptical, suggesting that it is only imagined. But the U.S. government's disease tracking agency, the Centers for Disease Control, offers assurance that chronic fatigue syndrome - CFS - is real.

One of the agency's leading scientists on the issue is Dr. William Reeves.

"One of the common stereotypes is that this is a bunch of hysterical, upper class professional white women who are seeing physicians and have a mass hysteria," explained Dr. Reeves. "People with CFS are as impaired, as a whole, as people with MS [multiple sclerosis], as people with AIDS, as people undergoing chemotherapy for cancer."

As evidence, Reeves points to a comprehensive government-funded study of 227 chronic fatigue syndrome patients in Wichita, Kansas, the results of which are published in 14 papers in the April issue of the journal Pharmacogenomics. The volunteers spent two days in a hospital ward undergoing detailed evaluations of their nervous systems, blood, sleep, cognitive function and the activity of 20,000 genes.

The outcome shows that chronic fatigue syndrome has five different subtypes. But the common feature is that sufferers have certain genes that interfere with their ability to handle physical and environmental stress, such as illness, injury and various other adverse events.

"The results are groundbreaking," he added. "Knowing that there is now a biological basis for CFS will help us identify ways to more effectively diagnose the illness and to come up with more effective treatments, including cognitive behavioral therapy, medications, or a combination of both."

The new research is the latest of several studies published within the past eight months implicating certain genes in chronic fatigue syndrome. But the scientists say it will take time to identify the biological pathways involved.