Vitals Spotlight – We Give the Doctor an Exam

Dr. Richard Podell

Tell a friend you’re suffering from Chronic Fatigue Syndrome (CFS) and they’ll cluck in sympathy. But a mind reader would hear “Huh? What a hypochondriac!”

CFS is often dismissed as the “yuppie flu” and thought of as a mental not physical ailment.  Patients are often labeled as neurotic or depressed. Those who suffer from the ailment find the word “syndrome” offensive, which implies that it is not a real disease.

Not so. According to the cover of the New York Times Science Section, a study published last week in the Journal of Science reports that many patients who have the syndrome are infected with a recently discovered virus. The link has intrigued scientists and is seen as vindication by some patients and inspired hope for a treatment.

Dr. Richard Podell, a well-known Chronic Fatigue Syndrome specialist describes CFS as a condition in which mild physical or mental exertion induces severe fatigue and increased activity will typically cause symptoms to worsen.

According to Vitals.com, Podell received his medical degree at Harvard University and completed a specialty residency at Mt. Sinai Medical Center.

CFS has long been a medical mystery and the subject of debate, sometimes bitter, among doctors, researchers and patients. This syndrome affects at least one million Americans, causing extreme fatigue, muscle and joint pain as well as sleep problems, difficulty concentrating and other symptoms that sometimes last for years. Its cause is unknown and there is no effective treatment.

Annette and Harvey Whittemore long believed Chronic Fatigue Syndrome was an infectious disease, but scientists rejected the idea. The Whittemores were extremely frustrated with the lack of progress in the scientific community, especially since their 31 year old daughter suffered from this syndrome for over twenty years. They decided if a place was created to find the answers a treatment would be found more quickly.  In 2004 they spent several million dollars to set up an institute at the University of Nevada, hiring Dr. Judy Mikovits to head the research. Indeed a test is expected to become available within two weeks, which is one step closer to finding treatment.

What Mikovits and researchers from the National Cancer Institute and the Cleveland Clinic discovered was a strong link between Xenotropicmurine, or XMRV, and CFS. But although they established a link, it still hasn’t been proven whether or not XMRV is the actual cause of CFS.

XMRV is a retrovirus that’s from the same notorious family that causes AIDS and leukemia in people. It was first identified three years ago in a case of prostate cancer and later detected in about one quarter of biopsies from men with that disease.

Mikovits reported in Science that they’d found that 68 of 101 patients with chronic fatigue or 67% were infected with XMRV compared with only 3.7% of 218 healthy control patients. Further testing after the paper was written found nearly 98% of about 300 patients had the syndrome. Mikovits believes that the virus will eventually be found in every patient with chronic fatigue syndrome.

Their next step will be working out whether XMRV causes CFS or just grows particularly well in people who have it. If XMRV does turn out to contribute to CFS this could point to new treatments. 

Medical skeptics believe the study is exciting but inconclusive. They feel that more work needs be done to find out whether the new virus plays a role in CFS. Just detecting it in a patient doesn’t prove they suffered from a syndrome whose very existence they questioned

But doctors who specialize in CFS adamantly disagree and are frustrated that medical science still hasn’t caught up with this debilitating disease. This new discovery may have finally turned things around for this poorly understood illness that affects more than a million Americans.