XMRV: The New Frontier

It's been just about a month since scientists at the Whittemore Peterson Institute published in Science their findings of XMRV, a novel retrovirus (and only the third infectious human retrovirus known with the other two being HIV and HTLV), in two thirds of CFS patients but less than 4 percent of healthy controls. Unpublished research done after the submission of that manuscript found evidence of XMRV in 99 of the 101 CFS patients studied. The WPI is now working on proving causality and finding effective treatments.

This is seriously earth shattering research. Overnight a world of new ideas has sprung up. New explanations for the pathophysiology of CFS, new scientists interested in CFS research, new avenues of research, new treatment possibilities.

Some people think it is too early to be optimistic about the possibility of having found the true cause of CFS. But other studies involving viruses have never had such a strong correlation. Whereas before we were looking at Epstein-Barr antibody titers that were barely borderline statistically significant between CFS and healthy controls, this correlation is incredibly strong. And no hypothesis to date has brought so many of the puzzle pieces so elegantly together as the possibility that XMRV is the cause of CFS. For example, just like HIV, XMRV could be setting up an immune deficiency which allows ubiquitous viruses such as Epstein-Barr to proliferate unchecked. Both HIV and CFS patients alike feel better when taking antiherpetics.

Already I've been looking for natural products that might be effective against retroviruses. Not that I'm against drugs, but they are expensive and it will probably be a few years before one is proven effective. And since Dr. Judy Mikovits of the WPI stated that the XMRV virus is turned on by inflammation, I'll be looking at both natural and drug anti-inflammatories as well.