Is Chronic Fatigue Syndrome a Viral Disease?

There are a number of conditions that are serious enough to those who have them, but have defied physicians’ search for a cause;  consequently, they’re often relegated to the class of ‘psychosomatic disorders’ - in layman’s terms, they’re ‘all in the mind’.  The best known of these are fibromyalgia and irritable bowel syndrome (IBS).  The Gulf War syndrome is another example where lack of a clear-cut cause has thrown it into the psychosomatic class.  Chronic fatigue syndrome is a condition of prolonged and severe tiredness or fatigue that isn’t relieved by rest and doesn’t have an obvious cause.  Now a discovery by Nevada and National Cancer Institute scientists has suggested a possible role for a virus as the causative agent for the syndrome.  The report is online in the journal Science.  

The researchers decided to test the blood of patients with the chronic fatigue syndrome for XMRV (a retrovirus, i.e. part of a family of viruses that include HIV, and known to cause immune deficiency in humans; many retroviruses are harmless, but others, such as HIV, can lead to life-threatening diseases such as AIDS).  XMRV is also found in prostate cancer patients. 

Of 101 patients with chronic fatigue syndrome tested, 68 (67%) had XMRV in their blood.  This compared with 3.7% (8 of 218 adults tested) in a healthy population.

This is considered a breakthrough by some infectious disease experts.  However, the scientists who ran the study point out that it’s possible the presence of XMRV is a side-effect of chronic disease syndrome, which has a completely different cause.  Obviously, further studies will be needed, but it’s an exciting finding, and an important contribution towards the shrinking of the group of psychosomatic disorders-without-a-cause.