“Exhausted” T Cells Found to Be Hugely Important in ME/CFS

Do ME/CFS patients have the same level of exhausted T cells as AIDS patients?

Chinese scientists published a research paper in early October that described surprising immune and neurologic profiles in CFS/ME patients that are similar to those found in Amyotrophic Lateral Sclerosis (ALS or Lou Gehrig’s Disease) as well as Parkinson’s disease (PD), Huntington’s disease (HD), prion-related disease and—although they didn’t place it on their list—AIDS. Yujing Sun and colleagues at a research center studying chronic metabolic diseases (in Jinan, China) examined a curated set of immune system components found in circulating blood: B cells, T (CD) cells, natural killer (NK ) cells, monocytes, conventional dendritic cells (cDCs) and plasmacytoid dendritic cells (pDCs). The stated goal of their research was to identify a biomarker and/or potential therapeutic targets for ME/CFS. (1)

The authors acknowledge that their sample size was small, but participants were carefully chosen from among many applicants to the study: four ME/CFS patients (three men and one woman) had to …