I found the latest study published by Julia Newton and her team to be very disappointing. They had the tools needed to measure mitochondrial dysfunction in the skeletal muscle of their patients and blood brain barrier permeability( phosphorous NMR spectroscopy and functional MRI respectively) but chose not to do so. They also chose not to use a control group which is as large a breach of scientific protocol as its possible to get. This is a particular problem here because her results can be caused by the techniques she used whether people have WHO ME-CFS or not. Briefly she reported a correlation between the variation in muscle PH and changes in cerebral perfusion in her subjects following something called the Valsalva manoeuvre . The problem lies in the fact that the use of this technique produces profound effects on the heart and the peripheral circulation and invokes compensatory autonomic responses. In short the use of this form of autonomic and cardiac challenge is known to reduce cerebral blood flow and produce profound changes in muscle PH and hence can explain her findings. Without a control group we dont know whether the use of the Valsalva manoeuvre produces any more change in muscle PH and cerebral blood flow in people with WHO CFS-ME than it does in healthy individuals.We also dont know whether there is a correlation between muscle PH and cererbral blood flow in healthy individuals. There is also every reason to suspect that these patients did not in fact suffer from WHO ME-CFS but that is another matter sciencedirect/science/article/pii/S2213158212000484
Posted on: Sun, 03 Nov 2013 11:07:47 +0000
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