ME/CFS Science

ICD-10 Diagnoses prior to ME/CFS diagnosis in children and young people suggest potential early diagnostic indicators Scientific Reports - ICD-10 Diagnoses prior to ME/CFS diagnosis in children and young people suggest potential early diagnostic indicators

10) Link to the paper:

Wirth et al. 2026. ICD-10 Diagnoses prior to ME/CFS diagnosis in children and young people suggest potential early diagnostic indicators.

9) "Need for vaccination against unspecified infectious disease" had a negative association with ME/CFS while the need for vaccination against influenza or COVID-19 was positively associated with ME/CFS.

Obesity on the other hand, had a negative association (OR: 0.84).

8 ) Some results are interesting though: ADHD had a negative association (OR: 0.80) while attention deficit disorder (without hyperactivity) had a positive association (OR: 1.5) - perhaps because of the cognitive dysfunction.

7) I suspect that for most of these diagnoses the patient might have already had the illness ME/CFS (even if they didn't get a ME/CFS diagnosis G93.3 yet). So the diagnoses given before might be misdiagnoses or comorbidities, rather than risk factors.

6) A lot of other common conditions also had a weak relationship to ME/CFS, things like back pain, hypothyroidism, scoliosis, dyspnea, but also mental and behavioral disorders such as depression (OR:1.21) and somatoform disorders (OR: 1.32).

5) The biggest odds ratios were for diagnoses that overlap with ME/CFS such as fatigue (OR: 2.19), mild cognitive impairment (2.93), fibromyalgia (2.08), neurasthenia (1.67), etc.

No surprises here.

4) The analysis only looked at ME/CFS diagnoses in the years 2020-2022 and checked which ICD diagnoses were more common in patients in the year before they received their ME/CFS diagnosis.

3) Diagnoses were based on the International Classification of Diseases, Tenth Revision, Clinical Modification (ICD-10-CM) where ME/CFS has the code G93.3. The researchers found ca. 6000 ME/CFS cases which were paired to ca. 5 controls matched for age, sex and location.

2) Data came from Techniker Krankenkasse, a major insurance fund covering about 15% of the German population. They looked at children and young adults aged 6-27 and found a ME/CFS incidence in this age group of 0.11%.

1) 🇩🇪 This study looked at medical diagnoses in an insurance database that preceded an ME/CFS diagnosis in children and young adults.

For example: bronchitis and sinusitis were positively associated with ME/CFS rates while vaccination or ADHD has a negative association.

To be determined later I think

Nationale Dekade gegen Postinfektiöse Erkrankungen: Erste Maßnahmen festgelegt - BMFTR Es geht voran bei der Forschung gegen postinfektiöse Erkrankungen wie ME/CFS oder Long-Covid.

7) Full statement (in German):

6) The steering committee and working groups will meet regularly in the future to develop a long-term strategy for the National Decade Against Post-Infectious Diseases. Further measures are to be launched before the end of this year.

5) Thirdly, working groups will be created to provide support for the steering committee on several topics. The first three will focus on:

- research infrastructure and biospecimens
- health-care related research
- translational research, bringing research into practice

4) The second measure says that "to be able to scientifically evaluate the success of possible therapeutic approaches, the conduct of clinical studies will be strengthened."

3) The genomic sequencing will be carried out in a first step based on the existing cohorts of the NAKO Health Study and the University Medicine Network (NUM).

2) The Federal Ministry of Research is providing € 500 million for the decade research progamme. It works with a steering committee that consists of experts from twelve institutions and associations.

It had its first session today.

1) 🇩🇪 The steering committee for the National Decade against Post-Infectious Diseases agreed on three measures to be implemented at the start of the decade, includes a genome sequencing project.

(An automatic translation of the German statement is pasted in the image below)

The authors have now decided to withdraw the publication:
vu.nl/nl/nieuws/20...

Uninfected had negative serology and results were similar for those aged 18-59. Lots of limitations in this study but I think the main conclusion that LC risk has declined substantially since the pandemic, holds.

4) More info about the grant can be found here:

3) Den Dunnen's research focuses on diseases such as Long COVID, post-treatment Lyme disease syndrome (PTLDS), and Q fever fatigue syndrome (QFS). It will investigate autoantibodies in the blood and whether the immune system mistakenly attacks the body after an infection.

2) The Vici is a career-defining grant, because it offers long-term commitment to a project. It enables researchers to develop an innovative line of research and further expand their research group over the next five years.

1) Prof Jeroen Den Dunnen won a prestigious Vici grant (€ 1.5M) for his research on antibodies in post-acute infection syndromes such as ME/CFS.

Vici is one of the largest personal scientific grants in the Netherlands. It's the first time it has been awarded to PAIS research.

Thanks for the tip.

Systematic Examination of Gene Expression and Proteomic Evidence Across Tissues Supports the Role of Mitochondrial Dysregulation in ME/CFS Myalgic encephalomyelitis/chronic fatigue syndrome (ME/CFS) is a chronic, multisystem disease characterized by post-exertional malaise and persistent fatigue. The cause of ME/CFS is not well understood, and there are no established biomarkers or FDA-approved pharmacotherapies. The clinical heterogeneity of ME/CFS presents challenges to diagnosis and treatment and necessitates collaborative efforts to generate robust findings. This study leveraged gene and protein expression data from the mapMECFS data repository and the DecodeME Genome-Wide Association Study (GWAS) to assess consistent gene signatures across studies. The mitochondrial genes MT-RNR1 and MT-RNR2 exhibited lower expression in ME/CFS cases in two studies. Combining this with increased expression of mitochondrial genes in platelets from another study, this supports mitochondrial dysregulation as having a role in ME/CFS. Furthermore, ME/CFS-associated genes were mapped to compounds in drug databases as possible treatments for further investigation. In muscle gene expression data, 107 approved compounds target 26 genes with functions relevant to mitochondrial support and immunomodulators. From the DecodeME GWAS, 83 approved compounds target 24 genes with functions related to energy metabolism and mitochondrial function. Though little consistency in specific genes was observed across studies, which highlights the need for larger studies, mitochondrial dysfunction in ME/CFS cases was evident across studies.

6) Think that's the main conclusion to be drawn from this paper.

Keele et al. Systematic Examination of Gene Expression and Proteomic Evidence Across Tissues Supports the Role of Mitochondrial Dvsregulation in ME/CFS.

5) I think these analyses can be vary valuable but only when we have much larger and better datasets. As the paper writes: "much larger omics studies of ME/CFS are needed to advance the field in terms of identifying reliable molecular signatures."

4) The paper also talks about drugs repurposing to target implicated genes but these results are also highly uncertain. To give one example: the NIH study by Walitt et al. had muscle data from only 13 patients but this study extracted 246 potentially implicated genes from it...

3) MT-RNR1 and MT-RNR2 are genes found inside the mitochondria: they help to build subunits of the mitochondrial ribosome. Lower expression could mean that the mitochondria are struggling but this is still largely speculation.

2) The two studies had very low sample sizes: only 10 ME/CFS patients in the study by Raijmakers et al. 2019 and 33 ME/CFS patients in the pilot study by Gamer et al. 2023.

They authors also used a lenient false discovery rate (FDR) of 10% to scan for genes.