Every feel like you are tired all the time but your doctor can’t seem to find the cause? You may suffer from a syndrome that approximately 10 million Americans have called chronic fatigue syndrome. Recently it has been discovered that a retrovirus is now linked with this syndrome, so treatment may be easier to find.
The virus, xenotropic murine leukemia virus-related-virus or XMRV, was found in approximately 67 percent of 101 patients that suffered from chronic fatigue syndrome by Vincent C. Lombardi, Ph.D. from the Whittemore Peterson Institute in Reno, Nevada, and his team.
The team also found the virus in nearly 4 percent of healthy comparison subjects, which suggests that millions of Americans could carry this mysterious virus that was first detected in prostate cancer.
Robert H. Silverman, Ph.D., from the Cleveland Clinic’s Lerner Research Institute, said, “The discovery of XMRV in two major diseases, prostate cancer and now chronic fatigue syndrome, is very exciting. If cause and effect is established there would be a new opportunity for prevention and treatment of these diseases.” Silverman is part of the team of scientists that first discovered XMRV, and was among the researchers that linked the virus to prostate cancer and chronic fatigue syndrome. However, it is still not proven that XMRV actually causes either prostate cancer or chronic fatigue syndrome.
In patients that have prostate cancer, the virus is seen in the patients that carry a genetic mutation that disables a key virus-fighting immune response. This virus is also seen in patients with chronic fatigue syndrome with and without this mutation.
Where did this virus come from, you may ask? This virus is very closely related to a retrovirus that has become a part of the mouse genome. Oddly enough, XMRV cannot infect mouse cells, but it can easily infect human cells. It is unlikely that so many people have caught XMRV from mice. It is more likely that the virus is spread from person to person, but how that happens is still unknown.
An editorial that was written by John M. Coffin from Tufts University, Boston, and Jonathan P. Stoye from the Institute for Medical Research, London, accompanies the Lombardi report, which is in the current issue of the online journal Sciencexpress.
Stoye and Coffin note that if 4 percent of healthy people truly carry XMRV, it means that this virus is astonishingly widespread. They say, “If these figures are born out in larger studies, it would mean that perhaps 10 million people in the United States and hundreds of millions worldwide are infected with a virus whose pathogenic potential for humans is still unknown.”
What is known is that the viruses that are closely related to XMRV do cause many different diseases, which include cancer, in other warm-blooded animals. Further study could reveal that XMRV is a cause of more than one well-known “old disease.” This could lead to potentially important implications for prevention, diagnosis and therapy.
