Mark Berry presents the first in a series of articles on the 11th Invest in ME International ME Conference in London … The 11th Invest in ME International ME Conference (IIMEC11) was held at One Great George Street, just down the road from its previous home on Birdcage Walk, on Friday June 3rd, 2016. You can view the full conference
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Simon McGrath provides a patient-friendly version of a peer-reviewed paper which highlights some of the most promising biomedical research on ME/CFS … Recently, Professor Jonathan Edwards, with patients and carers as co-authors (including me), published a peer-reviewed editorial in the medical journal Fatigue: Biomedicine, Health & Behavior. The article became their most-viewed paper within a few days. The editorial highlights
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Sasha gives the background and Simon gives the interpretation of the latest study from Haukeland, published today… It’s out! Dr Øystein Fluge and Professor Olav Mella have published their new study in PLoS ONE. And though the study was not a blinded, placebo-controlled trial, the results are further evidence that rituximab is beneficial in some ME/CFS patients, and potentially life-changing
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Sometimes ME/CFS emerges after mononucleosis, or glandular fever. Simon McGrath shares results from a long-term follow-up study from Haukeland University Hospital in Norway … “When will this end?” It’s a question that most ME/CFS patients have probably asked themselves and their doctor many times. I certainly have. Yet there is astonishingly little hard data on recovery rates from this illness or
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A concluding article for the ‘In Brief…’ Series, summing up the previous articles which attempted to explain the science behind fairly common topics and exploring how they relate to ME – by Andrew Gladman. Over the past few weeks and months I’ve been busily researching, evaluating and writing the series of articles under the subheading of ‘In Brief…’. The original idea
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The second in series of short articles attempting to explain the science behind fairly common topics and exploring how they relate to ME. This time the topic is Autoimmunity – by Andrew Gladman. In the last few years it’s fairly safe to say that the topic of autoimmunity has moved from a fairly unknown entity in the ME field to
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Andrew Gladman explores the current research climate of ME/CFS, discussing how existing research ties into the emerging autoimmune hypothesis. Throughout the history of ME it is safe to say that understanding of the condition and the research itself has been somewhat fractured at best and lacking significance in many areas. In the last 30 years, following the Lake Tahoe outbreak which piqued the
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by Sasha The charity Invest in ME’s plans for a UK Rituximab trial got a substantial boost at the end of July when Jonathan Edwards, Emeritus Professor of Connective Tissue Medicine at University College London (UCL), agreed to act as their advisor for the study. ‘No UK expert is better placed than Professor Edwards to advise us on setting up
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by Sasha On June 6, the Norwegian Medical Research Council agreed to give a large enough grant to the Haukeland Rituximab trial for the study to begin. Later that day, the charity Invest in ME announced that they were initiating a UK Rituximab trial. It seemed to come out of nowhere. There were no details – cost, size, location, research
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by Sasha On 9 March, ME/CFS patient Dr Maria Gjerpe started a 90-day campaign to raise $1.2 million (£780,000, €920,000) to fund a confirmatory trial of the effects of immune drug Rituximab on the disease at Haukeland Hospital in Norway. Ninety days because that’s all she could confidently commit: she herself had gone from bedridden to completely well on Rituximab
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by Sasha I call Dr Maria Gjerpe’s 90-day campaign to raise money for a crucial confirmatory Rituximab trial a ‘fundraising marathon’ but that hardly covers it. It’s more like a triathlon a day for three months. Maria, previously bedridden for years with ME/CFS, has been working 12-hour days non-stop to fund the Phase III trial on the drug that has,
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Dr. Maria Gjerpe, an ME patient for 30 years, explains how and why MEandYou are going to crowdfund a Rituximab study. Within 90 days we are going to raise 7 million Norwegian krone ($1.2 million) to fund a study on 140 ME/CFS patients at Haukeland Hospital in Bergen, Norway. Will we – the patients, relatives, friends – be the first
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