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Chronic fatigue syndrome is a disease so mysterious that it took years to be recognized as a legitimate disease, and doctors still struggle to diagnose it accurately.
Now, an experimental blood test has detected the syndrome, also known as SFC, in a discovery that, hopefully, provides new information about this impenetrable disease.
No laboratory test
The test tracked changes in the electrical pattern of a person's cells and accurately identified all patients with CFS in a small group of 40 people, researchers reported.
"When we insist on cells, we can easily differentiate them based on the signal that they show," said lead author Rahim Esfandyarpour. "It's a huge difference."
Esfandyarpour worked on the test with a team while he was at Stanford University in California. He is now Assistant Professor in Electrical Engineering and Computer Science at the University of California at Irvine.
Currently, physicians must diagnose CFS based on symptoms that have occurred in a patient. No laboratory test can provide a definitive diagnosis.
"There is no biomarker or diagnostic tool," Esfandyarpour said. "Everything is based on the symptoms."
Sometimes people are even told that everything is in their imagination. Nearly 2.5 million Americans suffer from chronic fatigue syndrome and nine out of ten have not been diagnosed, according to estimates from US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
Electrical activity of the cells
One of the clbadic symptoms of Chronic Fatigue Syndrome is the extreme fatigue that occurs after a person has exercised physically or mentally, researchers said in briefing notes.
Esfandyarpour and the Stanford team have hypothesized that this fatigue could occur up to the cellular level, the blood cells of a patient suffering from chronic fatigue syndrome reacting to stress so slower than those of healthy people.
So they created a way to track cell metabolism by observing their electrical activity.
The cells are exposed to a dose of salt, which puts them in a state of stress.
The researchers then pbad an electrical current through the cell samples to see how stress affects the cells' response to the current. Significant changes in the current indicate that blood cells are flickering under stress, unable to react properly, a sign that they are potentially hampered by CFS.
All blood samples from 20 patients with CFS created a sharp peak in the test, while those from 20 healthy controls reported that they were more effective in managing stress.
More research needed
The test requires further investigation into larger patient pools, both to verify its accuracy and to better understand what is happening in these cells, said Esfandyarpour.
"We know that we are seeing a big difference between CFS patients and healthy controls, but we still need to do more experiments to understand the contributing mechanisms behind the observed outcome and to ensure that this response is specific to CFS. "said Esfandyarpour.
Dr. Phil Fischer, a chronic fatigue expert at Mayo Clinic, noted that the new test revealed a "striking difference between tired patients and healthy patients".
But Fisher, who did not participate in the study, agreed that more research was needed to clarify what was happening here.
"We do not know yet whether the difference comes from chronic fatigue or a secondary consequence of fatigue such as reduced exercise," Fischer said. "We do not know yet how this marker would change from the beginning of fatigue to later, and we do not know if it would be affected by treatment." We also do not know what this marker means for a targeted potential treatment."
A "real product"
The ultimate goal is to create a portable, portable and easy-to-use device that would allow doctors to easily detect chronic fatigue syndrome, said Esfandyarpour.
"Hopefully this will not be just a study and will never have a real practical platform," said Esfandyarpour about these results. "We are trying to push him to become a real product that can be used by doctors."
The device could also be used to test drugs in the laboratory to treat CFS before clinical trials, Esfandyarpour added.
The results were published online in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.
Image credit: iStock
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