Whole blood human transcriptome and virome analysis of ME/CFS patients experiencing post-exertional malaise following cardiopulmonary exercise testing.
Whole blood human transcriptome and virome analysis of ME/CFS patients experiencing post-exertional malaise following cardiopulmonary exercise testing.
Blog Article
Myalgic encephalomyelitis / chronic fatigue syndrome (ME/CFS) is a syndrome of unknown etiology characterized by profound fatigue exacerbated by physical activity, also known as post-exertional malaise (PEM).Previously, we did not detect evidence of immune dysregulation or virus reactivation outside of PEM periods.Here we sought to determine whether cardiopulmonary exercise stress testing of ME/CFS patients could trigger such changes.ME/CFS patients (n = 14) and matched sedentary controls (n = 11) were subjected to cardiopulmonary exercise on 2 consecutive spidertattooz.com days and followed up to 7 days post-exercise, and longitudinal whole blood samples analyzed by RNA-seq.Although ME/CFS patients showed significant worsening of symptoms following exercise versus controls, with 8 of 14 ME/CFS patients showing reduced oxygen consumption ([Formula: see text]) on day 2, transcriptome analysis yielded only 6 differentially expressed gene (DEG) candidates when comparing ME/CFS patients to read more controls across all time points.
None of the DEGs were related to immune signaling, and no DEGs were found in ME/CFS patients before and after exercise.Virome composition (P = 0.746 by chi-square test) and number of viral reads (P = 0.098 by paired t-test) were not significantly associated with PEM.These observations do not support transcriptionally-mediated immune cell dysregulation or viral reactivation in ME/CFS patients during symptomatic PEM episodes.