Category Archives: Neuroimmune Disease

MS Light?

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What’s occurred in the last 30 years is criminal, Mikovits says today. “Mothers and fathers got sick, their children got sick.” But with heightened attention, she adds, patients are likely to get help soon. Even lacking a causal pathogen, biomarkers in this patient population can be studied for clues. “We can find therapies for the CFS patient population even before we determine the exact cause,” Mikovits says.
Chasing the Shadow Virus by Hillary Johnson Discover March 2013.

 

As I said last time, I started Viread again, because I became dangerously hypertensive, a few weeks after stopping it. I had a significant drop in my BP, almost to normal from days 6-12, then it went up again, not quite as high as before, but very high. After much fiddling, it is now controlled, but I had to add additional antihypertensive medication. Happily, after a month back on Viread, there is a downward trend again and I’m hoping I’ll be able to wean from the extra treatment soon. This is not the first time I’ve had this problem, but it was the worst episode yet, and was related in time to stopping Viread. I have been feeling significantly better for the last week, and am also back to baseline productivity. I flared for the first few weeks I went on Viread the first time also. I am going to Tucson to see patients in a couple of weeks and when I come home, am planning to restart Isentress and then Kaletra. I really didn’t want to go back on Viread, but it does seem that I’m getting a payoff again from it. I went off because I wasn’t doing well, and things got even worse, now better back on. I am just reporting, not explaining why or how. The disease is a relapsing remitting illness all on it’s own and changes may or may not have anything to do with the last thing you did.

My reading lately has been about retrotransposons and HERVs, especially MSRV, multiple sclerosis-associated retrovirus. Here is a cutting edge, must read paper, senior author Hervé Perron, whose name appears on most of the important papers on this topic: The DNA Copy Number of Human Endogenous Retrovirus-W (MSRV-Type) Is Increased in Multiple Sclerosis Patients and Is Influenced by Gender and Disease Severity.

MSRV increases its copy number in PBMC of MS patients and particularly in women with high clinical scores. This may explain causes underlying the higher prevalence of MS in women. The association with the clinical severity calls for further investigations on MSRV load in PBMCs as a biomarker for MS.

Human endogenous retrovirus type W envelope expression in blood and brain cells provides new insights into multiple sclerosis disease.

The envelope protein from multiple sclerosis (MS) associated retroviral element (MSRV), a member of the Human Endogenous Retroviral family ‘W’ (HERV-W), induces dysimmunity and inflammation.

Env antigen was detected in a serum of 73% of patients with MS with similar prevalence in all clinical forms, and not in chronic infection, systemic lupus, most other neurological diseases and healthy donors (p<0.01). Cases with chronic inflammatory demyelinating polyneuropathy (5/8) and rare HC (4/103) were positive. RNA expression in PBMC and DNA copy numbers were significantly elevated in patients with MS versus HC (p<0.001). In patients with MS, DNA copy numbers were significantly increased in chronic progressive MS (secondary progressive MS vs relapsing-remitting MS (RRMS) p<0.001; primary progressive MS vs RRMS -<0.02). Env protein was evidenced in macrophages within MS brain lesions with particular concentrations around vascular elements.

The above paper concludes that exogenous virus production is unlikely. Particles have been identified in MS patients going back to 1989: Leptomeningeal cell line from multiple sclerosis with reverse transcriptase activity and viral particles. 

In fact, a virus was identified in MS in 1975. Look at how far they got with the technology at hand at that time: Multiple sclerosis-associated agent: transmission to animals and some properties of the agent.

In confirmation and extension of observations by Carp and his associates, brain tissue and sera from patients with multiple sclerosis (MS) were found to harbor an agent which induces a transitory depression in polymorphonuclear leukocytes (PMN) in mice as well as in rats, hamsters, and guinea pigs. All of eight MD brains contained this agent at titers as high as 10(-9)/g of brain tissue. The agent was found in MS sera at titers up to 10(-3)/ml of serum, but its presence depended to some extent on the clinical status of the patients; it was observed more frequently in sera of patients with active disease (73%) thatn in sera of patients with quiescent disease (31%). Control brain tissues or sera failed to induce PMN depression. The apparently MS-associated agent (MSAA) passed through 50-nm but not 25-nm membrane filters (Millipore Corp.) and was largely sedimented at 105,000 X g but not at 50,000 X g for 1 h. It multiplied to high titers in the central nervous tissue of the inoculated animals and could be serially transmitted from animal to animal by passage of brain homeganates. Various observations and considerations appear to preclude that MS-associated agent represents an indigenous animal virus. Although its role in MS remains to be determined, it should be considered a candidate for the etiology of this disease.

Endogenous retroviral genes, Herpesviruses and gender in Multiple Sclerosis contains electron micrographs of MSRV particles.

Particle-associated retroviral RNA and tandem RGH/HERV-W copies on human chromosome 7q: possible components of a ‘chain-reaction’ triggered by infectious agents in multiple sclerosis?

The human endogenous retrovirus link between genes and environment in multiple sclerosis and in multifactorial diseases associating neuroinflammation.

Endogenous retroviruses represent about 8% of the human genome and belong to the superfamily of transposable and retrotransposable genetic elements. Altogether, these mobile genetic elements and their numerous inactivated “junk” sequences represent nearly one half of the human DNA. Nonetheless, a significant part of this “non-conventional” genome has retained potential activity. Epigenetic control is notably involved in silencing most of these genetic elements but certain environmental factors such as viruses are known to dysregulate their expression in susceptible cells. More particularly, embryonal cells with limited gene methylation are most susceptible to uncontrolled activation of these mobile genetic elements by, e.g., viral infections. In particular, certain viruses transactivate promoters from endogenous retroviral family type W (HERV-W). HERV-W RNA was first isolated in circulating viral particles (Multiple Sclerosis-associated RetroViral element, MSRV) that have been associated with the evolution and prognosis of multiple sclerosis. HERV-W elements encode a powerful immunopathogenic envelope protein (ENV) that activates a pro-inflammatory and autoimmune cascade through interaction with Toll-like receptor 4 on immune cells. This ENV protein has repeatedly been detected in MS brain lesions and may be involved in other diseases. Epigenetic factors controlling HERV-W ENV protein expression then reveal critical. This review addresses the gene-environment epigenetic interface of such HERV-W elements and its potential involvement in disease.

Here is a paper about something that could turn into useful therapy, overlooking the significant risks associated with the administration of monoclonal antibodies and the inherent risks involved in hybridoma technology, which involves fusing human cancer with animal B cells. GNbAC1, a humanized monoclonal antibody against the envelope protein of Multiple Sclerosis-associated endogenous retrovirus: a first-in-humans randomized clinical study.

Human endogenous retrovirus (HERV) genes represent about 8% of the human genome. A member of the HERV family W, the Multiple Sclerosis-Associated Retrovirus (MSRV) gene, encodes an envelope protein (Env), which can activate a proinflammatory and autoimmune cascade through its interaction with Toll-like receptor 4. Due to its proinflammatory property and an inhibitory effect on oligodendrocyte precursor cell differentiation, the MSRV-Env protein could play a crucial role in the pathogeny of multiple sclerosis. GNbAC1 is a humanized monoclonal antibody of the immunoglobulin G4 type, which is directed against MSRV-Env. After validation of the MSRV-Env as a therapeutic target in preclinical experimental models, a clinical development program was initiated.

In these healthy male subjects, the safety and pharmacokinetic profiles of GNbAC1 appeared favorable. These findings are expected to allow for the launch of a Phase II development program for this innovative therapeutic approach in patients with multiple sclerosis. ClinicalTrials.gov identifier: NCT01699555.

However, rather than injecting antibodies to gobble up the viral envelope, given the real and theoretical problems with monoclonal antibodies, it would be better to keep Env from being produced in the first place. Maybe a protease inhibitor is the missing link. AIDS drugs didn’t work well until they had PI’s. Dr. Snyderman’s data suggests this was the case for him. I am happy to report that he remains stable at 32 months. Does a response to a PI imply exogenous virus? How far does a HERV have to get in its reproductive cycle before a PI would do some good? SFFV is a defective virus with a pathogenic envelope. If MSRV produces variable particles, some of which appear complete on EM, is it ever infectious?

Reading about MS, thinking about my own clinical presentation and putting it together with everything we have learned since XMRV entered our lives, ME/CFS may exist on a spectrum with MS, in the same way that Aspergers Syndrome is part of the autistic spectrum. Certainly, we are a variation on a theme. I have called it MS light before and I think it is a good working hypothesis for now. Up To Date’s summary on MS is here. Note the many similarities, genetics, epidemiology (including cluster outbreaks), possible problems with the Hepatitis B vaccine. It seems to me our best hope post XMRV is to ride on the coattails of MS, even though it is pathetic that we need to, given that there are at least three times as many of us.

I’m getting lots of questions about what I think of the paper published by De Meirlier et al. Plasmacytoid dendritic cells in the duodenum of individuals diagnosed with myalgic encephalomyelitis are uniquely immunoreactive to antibodies to human endogenous retroviral proteins. I am not going to evoke all the reasons why I might have a problem with this paper, whatever it says. I have moved on. Much of it is documented elsewhere on this blog.

Taking the paper at face value, problems with it are the tiny sample size, from patients that I hope had very serious GI complaints, compared to the patient population as a whole, since, presumably, they warranted a duodenal biopsy. I would like to take this opportunity to emphasize that I am completely opposed to taking any risk of harming fragile patients with unnecessary procedures in order to study the disease. There is no reason to do duodenal biopsies on garden variety ME patients, so the patients in this study should have had significant inflammatory bowel disease, not just IBS. The procedure carries a significant risk. A duodenal punch biopsy can result in death. There is lots of tissue to study without resorting to that. Fresh tissue is harvested all the time for other reasons, there is lots of material to autopsy and lots of specimens in paraffin, which is what was used in this study. My small intestine in paraffin is stored down the street at the local hospital. And plasmacytoid dendritic cells can be harvested from peripheral blood.

The simplest explanation for the findings in this paper is that there was a range of proteins consistent with a generalized activation of HERVs. Many things can transactivate HERVs including recombination events and exposure to exogenous retroviruses. Perhaps they didn’t name the HERV because they were all transactivated? This is what you might expect in someone with inflammatory bowel disease. We have no idea whether these people had a neuroimmune disease or not. The fact that they had a range of symptoms that would qualify for a clasification of CFS is neither here nor there. Endogenous retrovirus-K promoter: a landing strip for inflammatory transcription factors?

There are quite a few papers worth reading in the references, but they missed one:  Cell-free HTLV-1 infects dendritic cells leading to transmission and transformation of CD4(+) T cells.

I hope they are right. It would set us on a path to catch us up to MS, where we belong. However, the paper is so vague. Antibodies to proteins expressed by a generic HERV. This negative paper was also just published: Human Endogenous Retrovirus-K18 Superantigen Expression and Human Herpesvirus-6 and Human Herpesvirus-7 Viral Loads in Chronic Fatigue Patients. It is good news for us that this avenue of research is being pursued.

I expect the De Meirleir paper to get shot down or be ignored completely. The scientific world will probably only read it for laughs, considering the source. They didn’t find a “real” virus this time, so nobody needs to spend millions of dollars to prove it wrong. MSRV was ignored for decades, even though it is associated with a more sympathetic disease than ME/CFS. Progress with it has been glacial, revealing the non-urgent, almost lackadaisacal attitude of the biomedical world towards activated HERVs, even one that was shown to produce viral particles over 20 years ago. In any case, infectious or not, there is increasing agreement that HERV W is associated with MS and can transcribe an Env protein which is neuropathogenic.

And another related illness: HERVs expression in Autism Spectrum Disorders.

I am particularly happy to report that my friend Dr. Mikovits is doing well through it all. She has received many letters of support and asked me to let the community know that she is fine and excited about the future. She is consulting with respect to drugs and diagnostics. She continues to lecture. Currently, she is working on projects with Dr’s Ruscetti and Lipkin, and, in a translational capacity with several medical doctors, Eric Gordon, Chitra Bhakta, Derek Enlander, Paul Cheney, Michael Snyderman and myself.

This excerpt is from an email to me a couple of days ago when I asked her a few questions for this blog:

Planning for the April 25th FDA meeting…a two day meeting to get drug companies and clinical trials going..to avoid the failure of Hemispherx..we have a huge opportunity here..talk about that..tell the patient community I will go there and work to bring them the drugs that are out there as soon as possible..we as a community do not have to go back to basic research where we are decades away..we can translate what we know.. write about that …move forward..

My background is in antiviral drug mechanisms and epigenetic drug development..I am going back to my roots to focus on drug development in infectious/ inflammatory disease…I can now apply my expertise and extensive network to ME/CFS..

Dr. Lipkin said this about her in Nature, only a few months ago:

I feel very badly for Mikovits, [her co-author] Ruscetti and Harvey Alter [a hematologist at the NIH Clinical Center in Bethesda, Maryland, who led one of the CFS studies]. Mikovits in particular — she has lost everything. She can be wrong but she’s not a criminal. She has been honest in a respectful, forceful way and said that we have to conclude that we were wrong. You can imagine how difficult it must be, and I think she should be applauded. Lots of people wouldn’t have the balls to do that. She has come across as a scientist who really believes in the importance of truth.

Dr. Judy has come a long way since then, pulling herself up by her own bootstraps. I am in awe of her resilience. Handed lemons, she is making excellent lemonade. Stay tuned.

Today’s song: Titanium by David Guetta

Twists And Turns

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The world will not be destroyed by those who do evil, but by those who watch them without doing anything. ~ Albert Einstein

When I started this blog, I promised to share my journey as it unfolded, before knowing the outcome. My goal was always to explore and learn, not convince anybody I’m right, since I clearly don’t know. So here’s what’s happened since I last wrote. A day after I wrote the last blog, I ran out of Cozaar (losartan), forgot I hadn’t put it in my pill case for the whole week and missed two doses. Before restarting it, I checked my blood pressure and it was 212/127. I’ve missed losartan other times in the last few years, but never with such a severe elevation and always responsive to restarting the med. But this time, my pressure stayed ridiculously high, even after adding a second drug, amlodipine, which I have used as a second drug before, but haven’t needed in several years. I have a long history of labile hypertension and a period of persistent severe hypertension was the problem that ended my Emergency Medicine career in 1996.

It happened about a year after my first symptom, following a period of unrelenting stress. The blood pressure elevation came with a feeling of doom. The numbers were often high, for most of a year, despite all the drugs my doctors threw at it. Initially my academically inclined physicians were excited by creepy medically unexplained symptoms in a colleague. They thought I had something cool, like a pheochromocytoma or carcinoid. They sent off all their esoteric tests and when it was all negative, or almost negative, they concluded that I either had a world class case of white coat hypertension or was crazy and not taking my meds. Indeed, the independent medical exam ordered by my disability carrier concluded I could return to the ER if I took my antidepressants like a good girl, despite my protestations that I wasn’t depressed and my blood pressure was very high at home too, with nary a white coat in sight, besides my own.

It is a long, sad story, filled with injustice and stupidity, mine and my doctors’. I’ve written some of it here before, but I’m mentioning it again now, because this current episode was so similar to what happened then. The hypertension occurred in the context of an abnormal stress response and autonomic dysfunction/instability. Because my dysautonomia occurs in the setting of hypertension, I don’t have POTS per se, but a variant. The autonomic nervous system wasn’t even part of the discussion back then, and here is why. The first paper in the medical literature on POTS, or orthostatic postural tachycardia syndrome, was published in 1993, only 2 years before my first symptoms and had no penetration as yet to an average work-a-day doc: Idiopathic postural orthostatic tachycardia syndrome: an attenuated form of acute pandysautonomia?

Even by 2002 when my husband developed severe dysautonomia, it was not part of the common medical lexicon, as it is beginning to be now, finally. Recognizing autonomic nervous system dysfunction as a core deficit in Gulf War Syndrome sufferers is a big step from our old concept of PTSD. So what do we think? Was it a new phenomenon? Or were all the doctors who came before me such poor physical diagnosticians that they missed it without the benefit of tilt tables?

As I have previously reported, I did not have viral onset CFS, but a very atypical onset and course, which was clinically more similar to Gulf War Illness than ME or CFIDS, as it was called then. If I’d been in the military at the time, instead of a civilian working in a trauma center, I might have landed in that bin. Now, 20 years later, it is finally starting to occur to the scientific and medical communities that the problem is in fact more extensive than the 250,000 soldiers who got sick at that one particular place and time: Report: New veterans showing Gulf War illness symptoms. Could this be a prelude to asking questions about the pathophysiological similarities observed in the various neuroimmune disease cohorts, diseases which were rare or unknown just a few decades ago? What risk factors are shared by vets with GWI-like illness, autistic children and patients with ME? Why is that question not being asked in the context of the public health emergency that it is?

So I’ve had problems with my BP all along, but nothing as severe or sustained since way back then, until now. I’m intolerant of most classes of antihypertensives, but have evolved an approach to BP spikes that works for me, basically temporizing until the episode resolves on its own, since experience has taught me that aggressive treatment will make me bottom out suddenly at some point. I’m better off accepting a mild elevation than pushing my luck, with such an unstable baseline. Hypotension is probably worse. Certainly, it feels worse. I did all the things this time that usually help, and everything else I could think of. I mentioned in the last blog that I had reduced my dose of Deplin as I was feeling sensitive to it while things were getting worse in December. I went back to my old dose of 7.5mg to see if that was the problem. Mood improved, but blood pressure didn’t. Went up to max dose on the newly added calcium channel blocker and took supplements and herbs which support vasodiliatation and relaxation. High dose Epsom salt baths. Biofeedback. Everything worked briefly, but still with regular readings above 200 systolic, plus the continuing waves of dread I was experiencing, so similar to the beginning of my illness. I was trying to figure out which 3rd drug to add soon if something didn’t give, knowing that all the choices were likely to be problematic.

Faced with only unpleasant choices, and since the problem was related, at least temporally, to discontinuing Viread, I decided to restart it. I was in no way excited or positive about it, but felt it was the least of the bad choices. Since stopping it, I had been feeling better in some important ways, with notably less nausea and possibly feeling a little stronger. So despite a strong preference for going ‘au naturelle’, and tired of being a guinea for drugs developed for patients with a different disease by drug companies with no interest in ours, and very tired of copays, I nevertheless found myself surprised to be back in a place where restarting antiretrovirals was looking like my best option. When Ali and I first started arv’s in early 2010, I believed we had a virus which had been confirmed at 3 labs, including the Cleveland Clinic and the NCI, plus published supportive in vitro testing. It made sense then, but now? I spend my energy working on natural solutions for patients. My own goal was to get off any drugs I possibly could. But the blood pressure wouldn’t give, trumping all my reasoning. I went back on…

On the 5th day back on Viread, with a resurgence of nausea worse than before I stopped, I was cursing drugs and drug companies, when my symptoms broke, like a fever. The high blood pressure let go, as did the other symptoms that came with it in a chicken or egg fashion, such as the fight or flight feeling from too much sympathetic tone. It isn’t just a number on a blood pressure monitor, but part of an entire symptom complex. Since things turned around 6 days ago, I’m doing better than before I stopped it in the first place. I have no logical explanation for that. BP is adequately controlled, at least pretty good for me. I am planning to restart Isentress in a week and I am considering lopinavir as a 3rd drug. See the last blog for Dr. Snyderman’s data demonstrating his response to lopinavir. Kaletra is currently part of a regimen undergoing a clinical trial for a beta retrovirus, similar to MMTV, in PBC (primary biliary cirrhosis), with evidence for growing, slowly, as is always the case when it comes to investigations of human retroviruses other than HIV.

Why might this recent experience of mine be interesting to other ME/CFS patients? Hypertension is not usually a finding in this patient group. However, vascular instability is. Increased sympathetic tone is. An abnormal stress response most definitely is. All of that apparently got worse and now better again, in an A – B – A fashion, taking, stopping and restarting Viread. And, distinct from my usual predicament, I could actually measure something. Numbers! BP now coming into line after 11 days back on, starting to decrease the second antihypertensive, didn’t have to start a 3rd class with intolerable side effects. I really wanted off, but I am not afraid of these drugs, so here I am again, and so far, so good.

After watching me twist in the wind for the last couple of months, Ali is planning to sit tight with respect to her antiretrovirals, enjoying her good fortune and relative stability. For those readers who are interested in her regimen for PCOS, she has decided to discontinue Actos for the long haul, even though it helps her in the here and now. She has started a slow wean, planning to increase metformin if necessary.

Having learned the hard lessons personally with respect to unvalidated tests from small labs with special interests, I came across this on Medscape and think it needs to be shared: Lyme Culture Test Causes Uproar. The link works if you have an account, but here is the first paragraph and exerpts of the article about a culture for Borrelia burgdorferi from a lab called Advanced Laboratory Services:

A new chapter in the Lyme disease controversy opened in September 2011 when Advanced Laboratory Services, Inc, announced the commercial availability of a new culture test for Borrelia burgdorferi. Some Lyme patient advocacy groups and physicians began encouraging patients to have the $595 test, but others are concerned about the early commercialization of the still-unvalidated test. This concern may result in changes to how the US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) regulates so-called “homebrew” or laboratory-developed tests (LDTs)…

Soon after Advanced Laboratory Services’ initial public announcements about the new culture test, emails and public statements attributed to Dr. Burrascano began appearing on Lyme-related Internet sites, including comments that the culture test was approximately 94% sensitive and 100% specific.

Dr. Burrascano told Medscape Medical News that the validity of the culture test was established using blood samples provided by physicians and that the identity of Borrelia was confirmed by its ability to grow in Borrelia-specific media, by its characteristic appearance on darkfield microscopy, by reacting to published Borrelia-specific polyclonal and monoclonal immunostains, by DNA polymerase chain reaction (PCR) at 2 different loci, and by direct DNA sequencing. These data are so far unpublished…

And here is the disclosure statement at the end of the article:

Dr. Burrascano has disclosed no financial interest in the laboratory, in the Borrelia culture, or in any intellectual property and receives no commissions from the tests. Dr. Burrascano is senior vice president of medical affairs and medical director for Advanced Research Corporation, a contract research organization with the same president and corporate address as Advanced Laboratory Services, Inc. Dr. Mead And Dr. Green have disclosed no relevant financial relationships.

Oy vey. Here we go again. Another unvalidated test to justify bad treatment. What’s wrong with the unvalidated tests they’ve been using all along? The ones that are almost never negative for various tick borne diseases? And this, hitting the presses coincident with the WPI promoting Dr. De Meirleir’s lecture, yet another doctor with a history of profiting from unvalidated lab tests. I think I’ll stop now, so my blood pressure stays down, and end on a positive note.

I just had the pleasure of reading Hillary Johnson’s very fine piece in the latest edition of Discover Magazine, available to non-subscribers soon in print at a newsstand near you. Her most excellent account of the XMRV saga, “Chasing The Shadow Virus” sheds journalistic light on the events that occurred and raises desperately needed awareness for our shadow illness. I was close to the events, have my own perspective and strong opinions about what happened and why; this article rings true to me, maybe because I have this same quote on my phone in a text message, “I still see the footprints of a retrovirus..” Yes, Pandora, the box is open forever. Denial is dark and powerful, but eventually, the truth will shine through.

We can discuss possible esoteric mechanisms from now until the cows come home as to why Viread stops an inflammatory process which causes my blood vessels to go into spasm: Brain Microglial Cytokines in Neurogenic Hypertension. But why not start with the most likely explanation? It is a drug which inhibits retroviral reverse transcription. Certainly it is a real possibility that it is doing what it was designed to do.

 

Big Yellow Taxi – Joni Mitchell

Our experience with antiretrovirals

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Two months shy of three years, I discontinued antiretrovirals, began after receiving reports of positive XMRV cultures from VIP Dx in January 2010. Ali and I started AZT and Isentress in March 2010, added Viread in May 2010, discontinued AZT in Feb 2011. I discontinued Isentress in August 2011 and remained on Viread monotherapy until two weeks ago. Ali continues on Viread and Isentress. We also tried the protease inhibitor Lexiva, and I tried it a second time, but didn’t tolerate it.

We both improved for the first year, but it wasn’t a clean experiment, as I’ve said all along. We did other things concurrently. When we started, I thought we’d ride on the coattails of HIV and have viral load measures in a year or two. We sent lots of blood to the WPI and Dr. Mikovits was studying us, but the specific results were never shared with me and are now lost, with the rest of Dr. Mikovits’ data.

We stopped AZT after 11 months, with no way to monitor, to prevent long term toxicity. Neither of us noticed much of anything coming off of it. By the summer of 2011, I knew there would be no help with monitoring and came off Isentress in anticipation of our both stopping the drugs. I wanted to see what happened to me first, before Ali came off. I tried to stop Viread shortly after. Nothing noticeable happened when I stopped Isentress, but I felt worse after a few days of stopping Viread, better when I went back on. I did that two other times by the first part of 2012, with the same results.

Meanwhile, Ali continued to go uphill. Me not so much. In hindsight, I wish I had not stopped Isentress, since Ali continued to improve and I didn’t. I functioned fairly well, with lots of travel and stress, through my last trip to Hawaii in October, but then crashed pretty hard. By Christmas I was feeling very poorly. I always say, when things go south, stop the drugs, so I did. Since then, I am feeling a little better. I am having less nausea than I was having on Viread, but my nausea predated arv’s by several years and when I went on arv’s, I didn’t think it was worse. I am now on only Cozaar, baby aspirin and hormones. As I got sicker, I my tolerance for Deplin lessened, interestingly, and I am now taking an OTC dose of Folapro 800mcg once per day. I have increased nutriceutical and nutritional support, am doing biofeedback, and am about at my October baseline, I’d say.

Here’s an interesting paper about raltegravir, though reactivated Herpesviruses are not a part of our clinical picture: A Drug Against AIDS Could Be Effective Against The Herpesvirus and here’s the paper: Structure and inhibition of herpesvirus DNA packaging terminase nuclease domain. It isn’t new, but I hadn’t seen it before. Here’s a new one: Biochemical, inhibition and inhibitor resistance studies of xenotropic murine leukemia virus-related virus reverse transcriptase:

We demonstrated that XMRV RT mutants K103R and Q190M, which are equivalent to HIV-1 mutants that are resistant to tenofovir (K65R) and AZT (Q151M), are also resistant to the respective drugs, suggesting that XMRV can acquire resistance to these compounds through the decreased incorporation mechanism reported in HIV-1.

So there are still scientists working on this really creepy virus that was created in a lab and infects human cells, but fortunately, not particularly well, though the statement below is not very comforting. Severe Restriction of Xenotropic Murine Leukemia Virus-Related Virus Replication and Spread in Cultured Human Peripheral Blood Mononuclear Cells:

In summary, our results show that XMRV replication and spread is severely restricted in PBMCs, but these cells can serve as a reservoir for generation of infectious virus that can potentially spread to cells that express low levels of these restriction factors.

It’s good for us that they are still studying it, because, although we don’t have XMRV, we still may have something very much like it. I still find the extreme resistance to trying HIV drugs for something besides HIV to be completely bizarre. AIDS drugs have been noted to be useful on occasion for Sjogren’s, MS and HTLV, but then generally nobody follows up even so. Here is the latest reference on clinical trials for HTLV associated leukemia: Clinical Trials and Treatment of ATL. I aways find it disheartening to read about HTLV, because it has been neglected for so long, even though it was isolated by Bernard Poiesz, Francis Ruscetti and their co-workers in Gallo’s lab over 30 years ago.

Speaking of dishearteningly slow progress, look at this paper from 2005: Association of human endogenous retroviruses with multiple sclerosis and possible interactions with herpes viruses. From the abstract: “Gammaretroviral HERV sequences are found in reverse transcriptase-positive virions produced by cultured mononuclear cells from MS patients, and they have been isolated from MS samples of plasma, serum and CSF, and characterised to some extent at the nucleotide, protein/enzyme, virion and immunogenic level.” And this one from 2010: The human endogenous retrovirus link between genes and environment in multiple sclerosis and in multifactorial diseases associating neuroinflammation. “In particular, certain viruses transactivate promoters from endogenous retroviral family type W (HERV-W). HERV-W RNA was first isolated in circulating viral particles (Multiple Sclerosis-associated RetroViral element, MSRV) that have been associated with the evolution and prognosis of multiple sclerosis. HERV-W elements encode a powerful immunopathogenic envelope protein (ENV) that activates a pro-inflammatory and autoimmune cascade through interaction with Toll-like receptor 4 on immune cells. This ENV protein has repeatedly been detected in MS brain lesions and may be involved in other diseases.” But nobody wants to try antiretrovirals on these patients?

Why is it such a stretch that the concepts learned from the AIDS epidemic could have vast utility beyond the treatment of that one well funded infection. Where are the drug companies??? We don’t have specific drugs and we don’t have any way to monitor the effects of the drugs we do have. So we are effectively stopped from studying something promising. A good percentage of the people who tried antiretrovirals experienced mild to moderate improvement for a period of time. Very little harm happened, even though it was a completely random and uncontrolled experiment. The drugs are not scary compared to many drugs that are given to ME/CFS patients every day. I can tell you there is a lot more possibility of harm from the SSRI’s, pain and sleep meds which are routinely offered, with no chance of positively impacting the disease process.

So, we as a community paid VIP Dx a bunch of money to tell lots of us we had XMRV. They are lucky the damages were only financial and not large enough individually for anybody to spend the effort to recover. Several people have sent me this: Transcribed  and posted on MECFS forums from Mass CFIDS/ME & FM Association’s Fall 2012 Lecture: (YouTube video of lecture by Dr. Byron Hyde)

Byron Hyde: The other thing he [Lombardi] says is that he studied under Dr. Suhadolnik at Temple University. So I picked up the phone and I [Hyde] phoned Robert [Suhadolnik] – who is a wonderful wonderful researcher man – and I said: ‘Tell me about Lombardi – who studied Chronic fatigue Syndrome under you and did research with you’.

He [Suhadolnik] said: ‘He never did’.

I said: ‘Oh ? What do you mean he never did ?’

[Suhaldolnik:] ‘Well, he came here for a few days and I got rid of him because he was a nuisance and he didn’t knew what he was doing and that was it.’

…one minute later:

Byron Hyde: I figure they (WPI) made somewhere between two and three million dollars on that [XMRV-test]. People all over Europe, people all over Canada, the United States, were sending their blood in. The other thing which is interesting is the Whittemore-Peterson advertises as a charitable institute. It is not a charitable institute. It’s got a Cameo institute on the floor below which is for fee for service. And they are there to make money.

Here is the WPI version: Date: January 6, 2013 (link)

Vincent C. Lombardi, Ph.D., Director of Research (…) He later continued to work in CFS-related research in the laboratory of Dr. Robert Suhadolnik at Temple University, studying the interferon regulated RNase L antiviral pathway and its involvement in CFS. (…)

The bio then goes on to give Lombardi credit for Dr. Mikovits’ ideas. Of course they also give him credit for the collaboration with Silverman. You’d think he wouldn’t be so quick to take credit for that. So let’s see what is left. He got a PhD at University of Nevada, Reno in 2005 and then invested in Redlabs and went to work running tests on humans. What was his dissertation about? When did the training happen that qualified him to be culturing retroviruses from humans? What prior experience did he have running a clinical lab? It would appear that anything he learned after finishing school must have been from Dr. Mikovits. Actually he was already trying to take credit for her ideas when I was there. He took me to breakfast in December 2010 and told me that it was really his discovery. He was rewriting history already, a dishonest post-doc, trying to discredit his mentor to a new colleague.

Please read Larry’s comments after the last blog (link). We were robbed and the WPI is still sucking up all the money. I expected a federal investigation of the lab, holding them accountable for the money they made on the tests, but it hasn’t happened. There seems to be no critical thinking on the part of the government agencies in question. So they have the grants, which will run their multi-year courses, irrespective of whether the money is producing anything meaningful or not. Nevermind that it is a very significant chunk of all the government money available to study our disease and it might be much better used. Why not give that money to Dr. Ruscetti or Dr. Lipkin? Or give it back to Dr. Mikovits, so she can get on with her work, as should have happened in the first place.

Posted last night on Facebook by Joan McParland:

NEWRY & MOURNE ME/FMS SUPPORT GROUP STATEMENT

As most patients are aware, Dr. Judy Mikovits has been forced into bankruptcy due to recent unfortunate events. A number of members discussed this issue at our monthly meeting last night and have made a decision to send some financial help to Dr. Mikovits.

The main reason for this action by some members of the support group is to show our support and also in an attempt to return the unreported kind acts and dedication shown to us by Dr. Mikovits on her numerous visits to N. Ireland.

Many more patients, worldwide, who have contacted me recently have also witnessed and benefited from the caring nature of the human being behind the scientist.

As from today, Dr. Mikovits is now free to return to work, we wish her well and hopefully she will be able to continue her dedication to helping find the answers we all so desperately need and deserve.

The entire situation has already been well summed up by Ian Lipkin’s quote below..

“I feel very badly for Mikovits, [her co-author] Ruscetti and Harvey Alter [a hematologist at the NIH Clinical Center in Bethesda, Maryland, who led one of the CFS studies]. Mikovits in particular — she has lost everything. She can be wrong but she’s not a criminal. She has been honest in a respectful, forceful way and said that we have to conclude that we were wrong. You can imagine how difficult it must be, and I think she should be applauded. Lots of people wouldn’t have the balls to do that. She has come across as a scientist who really believes in the importance of truth.”

On a much happier note, Michael Snyderman is still stable on full HAART. Stable cancer for 31 months. No chemo brain. And still no interest from the scientific or medical communities??? It is a travesty.

Dr. Snyderman’s update…

My study so far shows:

1. The combination of AZT+raltegravir has activity but is not sufficient to maintain the response.

2. Tenofovir has activity but is not sufficient to maintain the response.

3. Lopinavir has activity which so far is longer than previous responses. More data is necessary to know how long this drug will work.

4. A trial with more cancer patients is indicated.  We need to know what are the predictors for response and what is the optimal drug combination.  What is learned from cancer patients would potentially be valuable to patients with CFS.

Click to enlarge

Click to enlarge

 

Tonight’s song: Slip Sliding Away by Simon and Garfunkel

“2013 will be a year of optimism, opportunity and HOPE”

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Dr. Judy’s bankruptcy was final yesterday. She has lost everything financially. Let’s hope the vengeance is now complete. Her homes are being sold and she still doesn’t have her notebooks. She isn’t working as a lab scientist because of the Whittemore’s defamation of her character, despite Dr. Lipkin’s support.

And still the WPI asks for money from the community? For what? They have not published one paper in the year and a half since Dr. Mikovits was fired. Instead they have spent a bunch of money to ensure she is completely stopped. What kind of people would do that? Why wouldn’t they want her to be able to work? To live her life? She gave them five years, trying to help their daughter, but wanted to follow the truth instead of the money, so they did everything they could to destroy her. What’s in those notebooks that they are so concerned about? There is no intellectual property, since XMRV is not a human retrovirus, but a lab contaminant, so there must be something incriminating, something that leaves them vulnerable. But they won. They have the notebooks.

From a big picture perspective, as affects the patient community, the whole misadventure was so wrong, it’s hard to count the ways. We were robbed, on many levels. From a personal perspective, it is still incomprehensible to me that the promise we felt, back when Dr. Judy was being promoted like a rock star, has turned to dust. However, she has told me repeatedly that they have taken her money, but they can never take the most important things from her. From an email last night, after reading my draft for this blog, copied here with permission:

The copies of my notebooks prove my total innocence. I did my job and beyond…their actions prevented the truth and prevented me from getting work, and not only me, my students as well…but as you say it robbed the scientific and patient communities of data paid for by federal dollars and donations to a “non-profit” institution. I could NOT LIE or ALLOW the truth to remain hidden or support those who would not tell the truth in order to take advantage of a vulnerable patient population.

Their intellectual property was unraveling when it was found that XMRV was a Silverman lab contaminant..what they are and were afraid of is that they will be held liable for the fraudulent testing.. Lombardi and the Whittemores lied for 3 years and they all had a financial interest in VIPDx. There simply cannot be intellectual property or diagnostic testing for a virus that does not exist in any natural organism!!!

From my personal perspective it is incomprehensible, that in the United States of America, all of my constitutional rights can be denied in order to cover up the truth  …They do not want me to work because they are that vindictive. They know I live for my work in cancer and neuroimmune disease and for patients everywhere. They know my work is my life ..they thought they could take my integrity..but you know what ..THEY FAILED!  Because Lipkin applauded my integrity and succeeded at showing the world what Silverman and Lombardi did to this patient population..THEY are the COWARDS and I have my honor and my integrity but most importantly of all, I have the support and confidence of the patient population, not just the CFS patients but the cancer, Chronic Lyme, Autism, MS ALS, Parkinson’s.. that is, ALL the patients to whom I have dedicated my life.

You see, my life was never about money and never will be. I am still working as a volunteer, I enjoyed coffee with two CFS patients yesterday and a cancer patient this morning, before I went with her to an appointment. I have never stopped being a patient advocate and will continue to be one in 2013. As one of my courageous friends with aggressive Parkinson’ s wrote in a Xmas card: “2012 was a year of change and loss,  faith..we all needed tremendous faith to survive 2012!! 2013 will be a year of optimism, opportunity and HOPE”.

Today’s song: I Will Not Be Broken by Bonnie Raitt

Back To Basics

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I have always found this to be a trying time of year, even before I got sick. Our family is one of blended traditions and we often wind up celebrating both Chanukah and Christmas, making the whole ordeal go on and on (bah humbug:-). My husband and I thought we had fulfilled our obligations on that front, but now we have little kids at home again. Our eldest daughter Julie, who is half native American, moved back home last year with her two children who are Pomo Indians, and our son is home from his first semester at Tulane. Talk about a mish mosh!

I am having one of those days where even my arms feel heavy. Hey, who turned up the gravity? I feel tremulous, but it doesn’t show. I would like to go to a Christmas party tonight, but I’m not sure at the moment if I’m up for it or not. I’m replaying my whole tape loop about not wanting to disappoint. It doesn’t mean I won’t feel good to go when the time comes, but it’s up in the air at this moment. I’ll use my oxygen, take an epsom salt bath, and probably get the boost I need. More bothersome than the weakness though, with which I’m accustomed to struggling, is the emotional reactivity that comes with more inflammation. I’m sure many of you can relate…

That particular symptom was one of my first. It started just a few months after the birth of my second baby at 40, and it made me feel like I was becoming a different person. For those of you that don’t know me, I had gradual onset of symptoms, no PEM and no diagnosis for a decade, followed by incorrect diagnoses. I haven’t been bothered by this particular symptom for quite a long time and reexperiencing it is sending me back to the exploration of biofeedback that began when I first became ill in 1995 and was looking for a non-pharmaceutical solution for this and other alarming symptoms. In addition to neurofeedback with Cygnet, which I use in practice, I’m enjoying trying out some of the innovations for biofeedback hometrainers and stim devices on the market now. Advancements in electronics have made for easier to use, more effective and less expensive devices. I am particularly interested in them, because most of my patients can’t access a neurfeedback therapist and I had some devices way back when that might be helpful in this context. I’ll report on this subject at some point in the near future.

The FDA committee’s rejection of Ampligen filled me with mixed emotions. As it has been clear for a long time that only a minority of patients do well on it, and as it has some significant downsides, I’m happy for the would be non-responders who will be spared yet another therapeutic failure. On the other hand, other patient groups with real diseases are allowed to try toxic treatments that have only a small chance of success. I am of course concerned about the people who need the drug being able to get it, but the tragedy for all of us is Hemispherx’s failure to figure out who to treat with their drug; thus they have contributed nothing to our understanding of the pathogensis of our disease. They have also sent a loud and clear message to other would be drug developers to avoid CFS like the plague: SHAREHOLDER ALERT: Pomerantz Law Firm Has Filed a Class Action Against Hemispherx Biopharma, Inc., and Certain Officers

The same problem with patient selection is now happening again with the early experimentation with Rituxan: patient selection is random and there are no markers to follow. If you are sick enough, want it and can pay for it, you can be a guinea pig. I predict the stats won’t be good, for the same reason that the Ampligen results weren’t. There may well be a subset of patients that would have a higher hit rate, but nobody knows which ones. For me, it’s even simpler than that. I don’t want anything to do with it, personally or professionally, if it can kill. ME/CFS is a relapsing remitting illness. MS light. The best place to start is with the safest things, try to encourage remission, which requires synergy of global strategies.

One day soon, coming to a Quest or LabCorp near you, we will have a whole genome sequencing test that insurance will pay for. Then we will finally learn something that might change our options. But until then?

Still trying to understand why oxygen works so well clinically, in the setting of patients with increased oxidative stress, I’ve been reading about “mitohormesis”. Please take a look at these papers. This is a very important concept. Oxygen has been used to good advantage in the autism community and I still believe that the diseases are related, the differences in disease expression being due to the developmental stage at onset of illness. These papers describe the mechanism by which repeated doses of increased reactive oxygen species produce cellular resistance to stress. So repeated doses of hyperoxia in patients unable to exercise might produce better mitochondrial function over time, a theoretical framework for a clinically observed phenomenon.

Since I returned to practice, I’ve been intending to turn my attention to supplement recommendations for my patients. To date, I haven’t had a protocol and my advice has been random and half-baked. The passing of Rich Van Konynenberg left a great hole in our community. I feel a great personal sense of loss, because he and I intended to share with each other and it didn’t happen, completely due to my limitations, all my small supply of energy going to my practice. Now that I am studying the subject in depth and coming across his lectures and posts on the internet, I am very upset with myself. He was a brilliant, giving man. Generous of spirit. I am learning a great deal from him now, since he shared his ideas so freely.

As my second year back in the world comes to a close, my most powerful interventions remain high dose pulsed normobaric oxygen, Deplin, B-12, organic SCD diet, hormone balancing, stopping meds if possible, eliminating environmental toxins and biofeedback. I don’t think such a program will cure anyone, but I believe it can help a lot and is almost risk free. Three and a half years ago, when Ali and I discontinued Lyme treatment, I made deals with the universe that, if Ali got better, I’d be satisfied. Acceptance is my mantra. This recent dip of mine is challenging me to use that mantra, rather than dwell on my losses which only increases suffering.

Ali is spending Christmas eve with her wonderful beau, visiting with his family in Albuquerque, experiencing their traditions, planning to bring him back here in the morning for presents and brunch. She has finished 25 of 120 credits towards her degree at U Mass Lowell with a 4.0 average. I am so grateful that she is able to lead a full life – with disability, it is true, but a happy life nevertheless. Finishing this up, I realize I don’t have it in me to go to a party tonight, then walk in the cold for Santa Fe’s Christmas walk with the kids. I don’t want to hold them up or have them worrying about me. I prefer to save my energy for tomorrow. I’m a little sad that I’m not going, but my husband doesn’t seem disappointed, so it’s all good.  It is a glass half empty vs half full moment, sitting by the fire, thinking about friends that are also alone tonight, envisioning a wonderful new year for all of us, filled with peace, love and greater wellerness. Merry Christmas.

Tonight’s song: It Came Upon A Midnight Clear

EWOT?

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Our current predicament reminds me of the Jack Kornfield book, After The Ecstasy, The Laundry. Retroviral causation is still a possibility, but what to do after that flash of illumination? How do we circumvent the despair that comes with getting it and losing it again? I catch myself stuck in negative thinking, feeling like I have gained so much insight into the illness, but it came too late for me to do anything “important” with it. After I wrote the last blog, I felt guilty. I mean, after where we’ve been together as a community, who wants to read about watching your diet?

I returned to work still improving, but I’m not any more. In fact, following a couple of back to back bugs that my grandson brought home from his first grade class, on top of several months of prolonged stress, I’m back to pretty definitely sick. Therefore, I’ve decided to take the next 6 weeks to rehab myself, rather than dive off the cliff again next week, when I was planning to make my first trip to Tucson. Magical thinking pretty clearly isn’t going to get me through this time. I need to take my own advice. Physician heal thyself.

What do I want to do differently with this time, besides lowering my energy output for a while and being more consistent with oxygen, diet, supplements, neurofeedback, all of which I’ve done before? For some time, I’ve wanted to try EWOT or exercise with oxygen therapy. I use oxygen to prevent PEM, but I have never exercised with it on. It requires a high flow concentrator (> 8L/min) and a mask with a reservoir that will stay on, but not restrict air flow. There is literature to support the idea that elite athletes (and rats) can do more work while wearing supplemental oxygen, though results have been equivocal as to whether exercising while hyperoxic improves performance in the long run.

I have wondered if it might not also be true that our exercise capacity could be increased this way, we who are on the low end of the bell curve. There isn’t much to go on in the literature, but there are a few papers about exercising with COPD and an oldie but goodie about using periodic hyperoxia to improve exercise capacity in CHF.

And this important paper, that addresses the question of how a treatment that increases ROS in the short term, could be good for us? It suggests that periodic administration, as opposed to long term hyperoxia, enhances antioxidant defense mechanisms, essentially a training effect for the body to fight oxidative stress: Effects of exposure of rats to periodic versus continuous hyperoxia on antioxidant potentials and free radical production in relation to ultrastructural changes in myocardial cells.

Hormesis, a concept from toxicology theory, is a blend of less is more and what doesn’t kill you makes you stronger. Modulation of cellular response by the correct amount of stress encourages plasticity in biological systems. Cellular Stress Responses, The Hormesis Paradigm, and Vitagenes: Novel Targets for Therapeutic Intervention in Neurodegenerative Disorders. Calabrese et al. Here is an excerpt from the section “Hormesis, Mitochondria, and Neuroprotection”:

Recent findings have overturned the long-held belief that mitochondrial ROS have only a negative impact on cell function and survival. It is now clear that mitochondrial superoxide and hydrogen peroxide play important roles in a range of cellular functions, and can also activate signaling pathways that promote cell survival and disease resistance…Mitochondrial superoxide production is believed to contribute to damage of neurons in conditions ranging from chronic intermittent cerebral hypoxia to Alzheimer’s disease. However, it has been widely reported that transient exposure of neurons to low levels of superoxide that are converted into hydrogen peroxide can protect the neurons against a subsequent exposure to what would have otherwise been a lethal level of stress. This neuroprotective effect of a subtoxic increase in cellular oxidative stress has been termed “preconditioning” by neuroscientists who study stroke, but clearly falls under the broad umbrella of hormesis… [An] example of trans-cellular hormesis mediated by ROS comes from studies showing that oxidative stress can stimulate angiogenesis in the brain…

Here is another dot to connect:

  • Supplemental oxygen and muscle metabolism in mitochondrial myopathy patients.  In summary, patients with MM show impaired oxidative ATP production in their skeletal muscle, consistent with mitochondrial disease. This study has also shown that increased inspired oxygen concentration improves oxidative function in patients with mitochondrial myopathy, but not sedentary healthy individuals. It is hypothesised that the improvement in oxidative function with increased oxygen inhalation could be the result suboptimal oxygen conductance during exercise.
  • Oxygen Therapy for Mitochondrial Myopathy.  Letter to the editor, so no abstract, but here are excerpts: We report on a physician-patient with a diagnosis of undifferentiated autoimmune disease, pandysautonomia, and mitochondrial dysfunction… Her functional capacity has gradually improved, and her prednisone dose has been substantially decreased for the first time in 8 years. She can now drive around town, walk in a shopping mall, and perform some household chores. In addition, the hair that had previously disappeared from her extremities (thought to be secondary to either the autoimmune disease or medication side effect) has regrown. Prior to oxygen therapy, her soft tissues in the extremities were painful with a boggy firmness, a fibromyalgia-like finding also thought to be part of the autoimmune syndrome. This symptom has gradually, but significantly, improved through a combination of body work (osteopathy and massage) and oxygen therapy. Prior to receiving supplemental oxygen, the same type of body work had been only minimally effective… This case report suggests that supplemental oxygen can enable patients to perform higher levels of cardiopulmonary work with less lactic acid accumulation than room air alone. The use of supplemental oxygen may not only improve functional capacity and certain physiologic abnormalities but may also minimize the mitochondrial stress, which has been postulated to increase the proportion of mutant mitochondria.

I mentioned this paper recently, but it bears a closer look: Normobaric hyperoxia treatment of schizophrenia. It showed that schizophrenics improve sleeping with a nasal cannula at 4-6L/min for 7 hours at night (an uncomfortable treatment). The improvement in symptoms was confirmed by a cross-over design of the treatment and control group. The rat study of periodic vs continuous hyperoxia above suggests that the effects demonstrated in this study might be even more profound with a higher dose for a shorter time. Why would oxygen help this group of patients and what does it have to do with us? Schizophrenia is increasingly recognized as a neuroinflammatory disorder associated with HERV activation. Here is a paper suggesting even more common ground… Antibodies to retroviruses in recent onset psychosis and multi-episode schizophrenia. So, another group of patients who have antibodies that cross react with MuLV sequences, at least in the acute phase.

I wish I could share this whole paper here, because it touches on so many of the questions left in the wake of XMRV. It is well worth a careful read in its entirety: Human retroviral sequences associated with extracellular particles in autoimmune diseases: epiphenomenon or possible role in aetiopathogenesis? Perron. There has been quite a lot of work done on MSRV, a retrovirus, which lies at the interface of endogenous and exogenous retroviruses. Since ME is essentially MS light, MSRV is a good model for us, with a 10 year head start from where we stand right now. Some, but not all MS patients studied express viral particles, which may or may not be infectious. That fits the variable epidemiology seen in our families, where some patients are isolated cases, having never known anyone else with the disease, others have partners and children affected, but otherwise no evidence of being contagious, and there are even a few who believe that they have infected many people through casual contact (food sharing). The idea of recombination and copackaging of viral genomes once again brings to mind the issue of vaccines contaminated with genetic material from animal cells.

As part of the complex ‘biological life’ of such retroviruses, it also appears necessary to study copackaged ERV genomes which may account for their potential pathogenicity by e.g., recombinations or propagation of defective clone expressing pathogenic molecules, and may be at the origin of their rapid loss of infectivity by defective interference and/or ERV takeover. The complexity of retroviral genome studies in these situations, represented in this review by IDDMK in autoimmune diabetes and MSRV in multiple sclerosis, can become a major difficulty for a definite conclusion.

The multiple sclerosis-associated retrovirus and its HERV-W endogenous family: a biological interface between virology, genetics, and immunology in human physiology and disease. Dolei/Perron 

The HERV-W family is one of the most studied, after the discovery of its MSRV founder member (Perron et al. 1989, 1997b). Our haploid genome contains about 70 gag, 100 pro, and 30 env HERV- W related regions (Voisset et al. 2000), but numbers can vary (Mirsattari et al. 2001; Zawada et al.2003); in silico expression data indicate that 22 complete HERV-W subfamilies from chromosomes 1 to 3, 5 to 8, 10 to 12, 15, 19, and X are randomly expressed in various tissues (Kim et al. 2008). Presently, this family is active and generates new recombinant copies in cancer cells (Yi et al. 2004), retains characteristics of functional retroviral envelopes (An et al. 2001; Kim et al. 2008), and HERV-W transposition and retrosequence integration have been evidenced in the human genome through interactions with active LINE-1 elements (Costas, 2002; Pavlicek et al. 2002). Thus, non-Mendelian genetic rules can apply to HERV-W elements: a key feature to understanding their biology.

None of the known stably inserted HERV-W elements is replication-competent (Blond et al. 1999): a study of HERV-W intragenomic spread (Costas, 2002) confirmed that, in the few individuals used for genomewide analysis, the sequenced HERV-W elements lack intact open reading frames (ORFs) in all genes within a single copy. This finding, and the unusual short period of evolutionary time of HERV-Ws (5 million years, estimated on average integration age of different subfamilies), suggested that MSRV might be either an exogenous HERV-W, as in animal ERVs (Palmarini et al. 1996), or a nonubiquitous replication-competent member, or a partly defective but nonubiquitous copy seldom complemented within the HERV-W family (Perron et al. 1997b, 2000; Komurian-Pradel et al. 1999; Dolei, 2005; Serra et al. 2003). Today, though reasonable arguments in favor of the existence of a replication-competent HERV-W member, which might even be ‘‘exogenous,’’ have been provided (Belshaw et al. 2005; Costas, 2002; Perron et al. 1997b, 1992), the very nature of MSRV remains to be confirmed by future studies (Voisset et al. 2008).

They can follow viral load in patients and there is clinical correlation… From the same paper:

A direct parallelism was found between MSRV positivity and load (in blood, CSF, and brain samples) and MS temporal and clinical stages, as well as active/remission phases (Dolei et al. 2002); at MS onset, 50% of CSFs were MSRV positive, and positivity increased with pro- gression. Importantly, MSRV presence in CSF at MS onset was related to poor prognosis; starting from otherwise comparable conditions, after 3 and 6 years mean EDSS (expanded disability status scale), an- nual relapse rate, therapy requirement, and progres- sion to secondary-progressive MS were significantly higher (Figure 2) in patients with detectable MSRV CSF load at onset (Sotgiu et al. 2002, 2006a).

A recent study (Mameli et al. 2008) found that plasmatic MSRV load of naive patients with active MS was directly related to MS duration; longitudinal evaluation of patients during 1 year of IFNb therapy showed that MS progression index (EDSS/MS years) was reduced for the majority of patients, whose viremia became rapidly undetectable. Notably, one patient had atypically high viremia at enrolment and, after initial virus inhibition and clinical benefit, had MSRV reemergence, accompanied by strong progres- sion with therapy failure. The authors concluded that evaluation of plasmatic MSRV could be considered the first prognostic marker for the individual patient to monitor disease progression and therapy outcome (Mameli et al. 2008).

Just published: HERVs Expression in Autism Spectrum Disorders. Balestriere et al, an addition to the growing literature supporting the idea that activated HERVs are involved in autoimmunity, an appealing idea, providing an explanation of why the immune system might become confused as to what is self and what is not. The authors of this paper found increased expression of HERV-H, one of the HERV families implicated in complex chronic disease, in autistics as compared to controls. They also report expression inversely proportional to age and proportional to disease severity.

Our answers lie at the interface of retrovirology, genetics, molecular medicine  and toxicology. The further I go in my attempt to understand the problem on a biochemical level, the less optimistic I am with respect to so called “targeted therapies”. We simply aren’t smart enough and the system we are trying to influence is too complex. This is why therapies that affect the system globally are so attractive. Which brings me back to EWOT. Perhaps the poor, misunderstood Dr. Wessely could let his patients try some oxygen with their GET, now that he says he thinks they do in fact have some sort of a physical problem, in addition to being lazy, crazy and faking.

So, EWOT for ME? I ordered a couple of masks to try. Now I’ve really gone and done it. Set myself up by telling you all about it:). I will report back soon.

Today’s song: Fire And Rain by James Taylor

Recovery post-XMRV

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I have a lot to say today and too little energy with which to say it, having just lost ten days of life force to red tape and worry about complying with arbitrary and capricious rules. Between states with differing regulations, plus the DEA which has yet a different set of regulations, I feel like I need a law degree to practice medicine. The system is broken and it is incredibly hard to take care of patients appropriately. When I complained about it recently to a doctor friend in an email, he replied, “My tombstone should read: He died of red tape.” It was always bad, but now nobody even pretends it has anything to do with caring for patients.

My recent month long intensive in Hawaii, treating two young women with ME/CFS and many years of disability, has further convinced me that the therapies I am using are able to tip the balance in favor of a slow climb to wellerness. For the most part, the things I’m doing are not enough alone, but together these therapies are synergistic and additive with continued use. Everything I am doing, and why, is documented and referenced on this blog. The search function in the header works well. The patients are fragile and a lot of tinkering is necessary.

In a nutshell, high dose pulsed oxygen (normobaric and mild hyperbaric) to improve inflammation and mitochondrial function, bioavailable folic acid derivatives for improved methylation (Deplin and folinic acid), sublingual or chewable methyl B-12, Vit D3 replacement, infusions of a modified Meyer’s cocktail including taurine, glutathione by IV push and neurofeedback. Most significantly, I see improvement from weaning inessential drugs, replacing synthetics with bioidenticals, and using herbal treatments instead of pharmaceuticals. In particular, medical Cannabis, if tolerated, for patients who live in a legal state, is a more effective and much safer alternative for chronic pain than opiod drugs, which damage the gut and cause central sensitization over time.

I consider diet to be a cornerstone of treatment. Food as medicine. I advocate a modified SCD diet, allowing whole grain rice, for patients with neuroimmune illnesses that almost always include a GI component in the symptom complex. I encourage SCD yogurt as a probiotic, superfemented to be lactose free and have a high live bacteria count. I also advocate eating organic, and no processed or GMO foods. In particular, avoid the excitotoxins, aspartame and MSG. Here is an important YouTube, by Dr. Terry Wahls, in remission from a wheel chair through dietary intervention alone:

I received some flak for saying that I’m a lumper, not a splitter, with respect to segregating subsets of patients, except for research. From the point of view of clinical medicine, breaking it down into separate cohorts doesn’t help me at all. It is all neuro-immune illness. The therapeutic options are extremely limited. The same things are worth trying in other cohorts also. Many, if not most, of the therapies that are being used in the ASD community are applicable to us. ME is on a continuum with MS and ALS. GWI and chronic Lyme Disease wind up clinically indistinguishable from ME. Fibromyalgia is a subset, not a separate illness. Again, the same treatments are applicable for the same reasons, even if the illnesses look a bit different.

The first thing that happens when there is a response to therapy is improved resilience. A push that would have caused a long crash, doesn’t, but brings minor payback only. At first most everything still feels crappy all the time, though some things have improved. Then some moments that aren’t so crappy creep in. Then some actual good moments. Crappy always comes back though, and when it does, it feels like falling back into the black hole. But it passes much more quickly than before. Improvement needs to be judged in fairly large increments of time, at least 6 months to be sure. One of the young women I treated last month posted this on her FaceBook a few days ago, “I had a good day today; I don’t think I’ve said that in 8 years :)”. That, after only a month of nearly risk free treatment. A long way from a cure, but relief is relief.

Here are some new noteworthy references with respect to oxygen therapy:

I had the pleasure of hearing Dr. Mikovits on Sue Vogan’s radio show, In Short Order, finally able to speak openly in public. The interview is archived here. I thought she was very clear and brave as she answered all the hard questions. XMRV is not a human pathogen. There could be other retroviruses as yet undetected. The mistakes made will inform future research. I personally felt abandoned after the Lipkin paper, subsequent interview by Dr. Lipkin and the press conference, but I am encouraged to hear that he and Dr. Ruscetti are still working on our behalf. They don’t know what the positive serologies mean.  It is tragic that she can’t go back and find out what went wrong so that everyone can learn from it, but much has been learned nevertheless. The only thing she said that I took exception with was that there is no evidence that XMRV has ever infected an animal. Persistent infection has been demonstrated in Macaques after parenteral introduction of virus, exposures similar to what has been happening regularly throughout the history of injected biologicals, dating back to vaccinations with the exudate of cow pox lesions, which certainly contained bovine leukemia viruses, similar to HTLV, and are artificially transferrable to other non-bovine species:

And take a look at this one: Long-Term Infection and Vertical Transmission of a Gammaretrovirus in a Foreign Host Species

So it isn’t XMRV. Other cell lines express other infectious animal retroviruses. Live attenuated vaccines are grown in animal cells that express exogenous retroviruses. Other vaccines contain DNA fragments. Here is the government’s list of vaccine excipients: Vaccine Excipient & Media Summary by vaccine and by excipient. That’s now. The early vaccines were attenuated in live animals. Mouse brains injected into people.

But, say it isn’t an exogenous retrovirus. Why then might antiretrovirals have an effect, in addition to the obvious elephant in the room? The drugs might be preventing transcription of activated HERV’s: Association of human endogenous retroviruses with multiple sclerosis and possible interactions with herpes viruses.

The hypothesis that human endogenous retroviruses (HERVs) play a role in autoimmune diseases is subject to increasing attention. HERVs represent both putative susceptibility genes and putative pathogenic viruses in the immune-mediated neurological disease multiple sclerosis (MS). Gammaretroviral HERV sequences are found in reverse transcriptase-positive virions produced by cultured mononuclear cells from MS patients, and they have been isolated from MS samples of plasma, serum and CSF, and characterised to some extent at the nucleotide, protein/enzyme, virion and immunogenic level. Two types of sequences, HERV-H and HERV-W, have been reported. No known HERV-H or HERV-W copy contains complete ORFs in all prerequisite genes, although several copies have coding potential, and several such sequences are specifically activated in MS, apparently resulting in the production of complete, competent virions. Increased antibody reactivity to specific Gammaretroviral HERV epitopes is found in MS serum and CSF, and cell-mediated immune responses have also been reported. Further, HERV-encoded proteins can have neuropathogenic effects. The activating factor(s) in the process resulting in protein or virion production may be members of the Herpesviridae. Several herpes viruses, such as HSV-1, VZV, EBV and HHV-6, have been associated with MS pathogenesis, and retroviruses and herpes viruses have complex interactions. The current understanding of HERVs, and specifically the investigations of HERV activation and expression in MS are the major subjects of this review, which also proposes to synergise the herpes and HERV findings, and presents several possible pathogenic mechanisms for HERVs in MS.

Or antiretrovirals, reverse transcriptase and integrase inhibitors, might be inhibiting retroposons:

What makes jumping genes jump? Demethylation.

Reverse transcriptase inhibitors presumably inhibit other viruses besides retroviruses if reverses transcription is required in the replicative process. Viread is used to treat chronic hepatitis B, for example. Hepatitis B is a DNA virus that replicates through an RNA intermediate and uses reverse transcription.

Telomerase is a reverse transcriptase. Therefore, arguably RTI’s might cause faster aging, but might tip the balance away from developing cancer. The more you think about it all, the more you realize that, like all drugs, antiretrovirals are blunt swords with many possible mechanisms of effect, all of which says that clinical trials are in order. One would think that the manufacturers would be interested in new indications for their drugs.

My own illness could be explained by a post polio syndrome caused by an attenuated virus, but it doesn’t fit my daughter. Does an enterovirus explain the vertical transmission seen in our families or a response to  antiretrovirals? Does anyone reading know the answer to those questions? Many of us remember the sugar cube that held the first oral polio vaccine. Polio virus can persist: Transmissibility and persistence of oral polio vaccine viruses: implications for the global poliomyelitis eradication initiative.

Protein from helper viruses and recombination events can rescue defective virus. Innumerable chances have occurred: Science Fiction or Fact? 35 years ago, when I was in medical school, autism and MS were rare. Autoimmunity has skyrocketed beyond belief, as has cancer.

Here’s an unsettling paper. Chemical Induction of Endogenous Retrovirus Particles from the Vero Cell Line of African Green Monkeys. Vero cells are present in the DTaP-Hep B-IPV, Poliovirus inactivated and Rotavirus vaccines. AzaC, one of the chemicals used in this paper is a demethylator. Other methods used in the lab to activate ERV’s and amplify retroviruses in tissue culture are radiation and steroid hormones, bringing to mind the myriad ways in which our environment is contaminated, contributing to the cluster fuck for the genetically susceptible and overexposed. Let’s wrap up today with this article which I haven’t finished yet, but it looks to be well researched: What Is Coming Through That Needle? The Problem of Pathogenic Vaccine Contamination.

 Today’s song: Burn One Down

Life’s A Long Song

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It’s been a very strange and unusual three years. The Lipkin study was the closing of the door opened by the Science paper in October 2009. For me, the shift from thinking about neuroborreliosis to retroviral causation for ME/CFS led to clinical decisions that have resulted in great improvement for both Ali and me. We are not well, but we are both leading full and meaningful lives, within the confines of illness. Existing within the confines of illness means the same thing for us that it does for other people with disabilities who need accommodations. It does not mean trapped in endless suffering with no help in sight. Prior to the fall of 2009, Ali and I spent a few really grim years couch bound together, wondering if a quick merciful end wouldn’t be a good thing. Now we are working and going to school. We are even playing some. We need to do it “our way”, but it is happening.

My personal journey through the world of XMRV was littered with betrayal and abandonment, so in a sense, I’m glad that part of it is over. I’m left to practice medicine much as I did before, but with new insight. Three years of reading retrovirology has changed my view of many things, medical, scientific and political. I’m in Hawaii right now treating two young ME women. Much of what I’m doing is a refinement of what I did in my last practice a decade ago. My own emotional adjustment to the collapse of the science involves accepting that the tools I have now are all there is likely to be for a long time. There isn’t going to be a cure and it is a long way off before conventional medicine has anything better to offer than what’s listed on the Mayo Clinic site: sleep meds and antidepressants, which many of us don’t tolerate.  Not even pain meds or anxiolytics. Exercise and therapy, because we are so overly focused on our symptoms. Back on the trash heap.

So where’s the redemption in this story that makes it worth writing about? ME, or ME/CFS, or CFIDS (since I’m a lumper, not a splitter) is a relapsing, remitting illness. It can be coaxed into remission. Remission doesn’t mean normal or healthy. It means not suffering so much. It is a process of encouraging healing and discouraging inflammation, requiring a gentle, multi-pronged approach that relies on synergy, tinkering and luck. Find some maneuvering room, a key for the lock. It is possible to stop the downward spiral, tip the balance and start the slow climb out. Unfortunately, there is never a uniform response to a given therapy with this illness, so treatment can’t be formulaic. When recovery does start, it is slow and fragile. It must be nurtured and it takes years, that from personal experience, since I have only been back in practice for a little over a year. Although, I have heard of spontaneous recoveries many years in, most involve hard work and careful choices. One thing I know for sure. There was never a patient population less suited to medical heroics.

Meanwhile, I sit here in the weird position of being better and still apparently improving on Viread for 2 1/2 years. I was so bad 4 years ago, nobody expected me to do anything productive ever again. Ask my ex-Lyme doc. I had a sleep disorder to rival any of my readers and I know some of you have pretty spectacular sleep problems. I now sleep normally. Even normal dreaming has returned in the last 6 months or so. My gut is also functioning normally on a modified SCD diet, 6 years after emergency surgery for a small bowel obstruction and a Crohn’s diagnosis. My intractable peripheral neuropathy pain, which once required opiates, is now little more than background noise except at the worst moments. PEM is reduced, but still problematic. I can exercise a little, being careful not to overdo, because it feels good in the moment. I won’t list Ali’s symptoms, but she is similarly improved on Viread and Isentress. Her horizons are ever expanding, her illness less and less restrictive. Have we done other things at the same time? Yes. Will antiretrovirals for ME/CFS be studied at all? Not a chance. Our government just spent a couple of million dollars to ensure that ideas like mine stay marginalized.

Dr. Lipkin was quoted on the IMEA FaceBook page in response to questions about whether any “positives” were found, “The investigators reported results as positive or negative according to their own criteria. The only requirement was that once criteria were established results could not be changed through modifications in criteria. I know this is not the intention of those who continue to pose these questions; nonetheless, the impact of this continued challenge to work of the team is that some people in the scientific community who might contribute are becoming reluctant to work on CFS/ME.” Yet, at the press conference, he encouraged us to advocate for ourselves more effectively. So we need to ACT UP, but be nice about it. Any ideas? We are a group in desperate need of effective advocacy. It’s not only the middle aged going down. There is a tidal wave of young people. They are not as visible as their autistic cousins, but just as profoundly disabled. Who is going to care for them when their parents are gone? We need to start advocating for them effectively now.

Life’s A Long Song by Jethro Tull

Now You See It, Now You Don’t

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The Lipkin study buries XMRV once and for all, completely leaving aside the question of an infectious chimera out and about that contaminates a clean lab in a matter of days and is capable of infecting monkeys. But it wasn’t in the blood of the patients or controls in this study. That much is clear, forgetting the unscientific claim that this study, or any study, is definitive of anything. Science is self-correcting, as Dr. Lipkin reminded us, but only if the game isn’t rigged. This is a repeat performance of the definitive study that showed that the MMR doesn’t cause autism, which also side-stepped the bigger question. The use of the word definitive tells us we are dealing with politics, not science. Sleight of hand.

The paper didn’t even try to speculate as to the one positive finding, that 6% of the study group, patients and controls, cross reacted with a test designed to detect SFFV, a nasty murine retrovirus. Whatever it is they are picking up with this serology test, “modified slightly” from the one once used at the WPI, the various PCR’s used in this study, optimized to detect XMRV and a piece of a “generic” pMLV, couldn’t detect it. But that doesn’t mean it isn’t there.

A young friend emailed after watching the press conference asking that I blog because my blogs are hopeful. I’m not sure how to spin this as hopeful other than XMRV got us into national news as having a real disease. It’s good that there are people studying us, even if they are abandoning the hypothesis of best fit. So, as my friend asked, do we still have retroviruses? The answer is everybody has retroviruses. 8% of the human genome consists of retroviral sequences. It is becoming accepted that these sequences are capable of causing trouble in some people, whether they produce fully replicative virus or not. SFFV is a replication-defective virus that causes disease in mice: The spleen focus-forming virus (SFFV) envelope gene, when introduced into mice in the absence of other SFFV genes, induces acute erythroleukemia. S Ruscetti

The Lipkin study in no way disproves the hypothesis that simple animal retroviruses, alpha, beta and gamma, parenterally introduced, in the form of vaccines and from other sources, e.g. hybridomas, xenografts, etc., have recombined and rescued defective endogenous retroviruses, and/or created new and as yet unrecognized exogenous retroviruses. The existence of XMRV, is supportive of this theory. There have been so many chances for it to happen, in addition to the possibility that it happened naturally. This means that we each may have something a little different. Which is why they can’t find “it”.

Personally, as a defender of Dr. Mikovits during this entire mess, I appreciated Dr. Lipkin for openly defending her struggle against the Whittemores. The scientist who put the nail in XMRV’s coffin. Dr.’s Mikovits, Ruscetti and Alter completed the difficult task of acknowledging they’d been mistaken. Our disease has finally been deemed “serious and life threatening” to enable fast tracking of drugs, should there be any drugs worth fast tracking, which seems unlikely if nobody is studying the root cause of the disease, only looking at downstream effects.

I’m not even going to question the study design, patient selection, specimen handling, that the patients chose their own controls, etc. I accept at face value that Dr. Lipkin put together a convincing study in order to put the final nail in the coffin about XMRV. No surprise there. I assumed the study would be negative. But I expected the authors to have the intellectual integrity to state that ruling out XMRV does not rule out retroviruses. Instead they allowed the press to distort in predictable ways. I therefore must conclude that Dr. Lipkin plays for the home team. His task was to kill it and reassimilate the renegade scientists into the group. To make sure that nobody does any clinical trials of arv’s, the paper suggests that the patient community has been saved from that terrible fate by this definitive paper. Mikovits’ name right there with Coffin’s. Task accomplished. But even Coffin said that it might be another retrovirus. Smart people allowing distortion and partial truths. It looks to me like we’ve been thrown back on the trash heap. From the Wall Street Journal. Viruses not to blame for chronic fatigue syndrome after all. Thank you Mr. WSJ editor for that headline, suitable for a tabloid.

Why do I still believe retroviruses are involved in causation in the face of so much evidence against XMRV? Even though we don’t have XMRV or active replicating virus with some certain degree of sequence homology to a piece of a “generic” pMLV, retroviral causation has not been ruled out. It is still the best explanation for all of the observed phenomena. It works as a clinical model to explain the symptoms and put treatments in context. It even explains the obvious but still unstudied epidemiology. Dr. Mikovits was trying to sequence what she believed were positive cultures that were negative for XMRV. She sent out letters to that effect to patients.

Then there is the response to antiretrovirals. Dr. Snyderman has presented amazing data, that most of the scientists involved in this story have seen and ignored. He has not been cured, but his leukemic cells and his cells capable of making cytokines have decreased with treatment. Cancer treated like a chronic disease, like diabetes or AIDS. I don’t think they are stupid, so they don’t want to know. Why not?

If the response of longstanding ME/CFS patients to limited arv’s (RTI’s and II’s alone) had been more robust, we wouldn’t even be having this discussion. It wasn’t. There were early responses that were encouraging, but with no way to follow, after a while, you’re left not knowing what is happening. Meaning we don’t know how to use the drugs, not that they have no value. Maybe they should be pulsed or given low dose for N chain termination. Maybe a protease inhibitor is necessary for full effect. Dr. Snyderman is documenting an ongoing response to Kaletra. The best case we heard about anecdotally was a teenager, hadn’t been sick long, responded fully and the drugs were stopped at 6 months, remaining well as far as I know. It is beyond sad that this case was not published. While new teenagers get sick with an “untreatable” disease, they are denied a trial of very safe existing drugs. It could have been studied for a lot less than the 2 million dollars spent to prove it isn’t XMRV.

I have tried to discontinue Viread on three occasions, since our drug co-pays are a problem, and I haven’t been able to do it. I get sicker within days and feel better quickly after restarting. Can I prove it? No of course not. The disease is a relapsing remitting illness all on it’s own. However, I didn’t have trouble stopping AZT or Isentress. I have been under enormous stress since June, with one thing after another, one of those times in life when the waves just keep coming, too close together for recovery. I am a little worse than I was, but only a little. I’ve even been able to ride the tandem a couple of times recently, only 5 miles on the flat, but no PEM after. Ali continues to do extremely well on Viread and Isentress. She has considered stopping arv’s, but has decided not to rock the boat at this time, since improvement seems to be continuing very, very slowly. The possible downside besides financial? I don’t know of any for Ali. I’ve aged a lot in the last couple of years, though it is on time, coming after a late menopause, so I can’t really blame Viread for that. I heard from a patient yesterday who did well on AZT, Viread and Isentress for a year, but then went back to baseline for another year with some new symptoms that could have been drug related, though hard to know. As I said, we don’t know how to use these drugs. We have no way to monitor. That doesn’t mean they have no value.

But Dr. Lipkin told Dr. Racaniello:

I know some in the community –the scientific community—feel that this was not money well spent, but the fact is, I think that we have obviated a lot of, you know, missteps that might have followed with clinical trials and such for antiretrovirals. And in addition, we have been able to establish a sample bank that will be helpful for years to come. And we’ve been able to hold, I think, the attention of the community.

So Dr. Snyderman, Ali and I are missteps…

From the 3rd paragraph of the paper:

Since the index publications, clinics have been established for the treatment of ME/CFS with antiretroviral drugs…

This is a complete fabrication. Where are these clinics?

It is completely incorrect, and unscientific, to conclude anything from the Lipkin study other than they didn’t find XMRV or a particular pMLV sequence. That’s a long way from no viruses or even no retroviruses in CFS. How is it that 2 million dollars was spent to tell us what we already knew a year ago? No reproducible assay. 2 million dollars and all that effort to prove what isn’t. For three years, we’ve been waiting for the scientific community to run with the ball. Now it is pretty clear, the ball has been dropped, while they huddle to congratulate each other on a job well done. The status quo is restored.

 

Today’s song: Who’ll Stop The Rain by Creedence Clearwater Revival

We Must Move Forward by Michael Snyderman, MD

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Dear fellow patients, physicians and scientists:

The quest for identifying and treating retroviruses that are involved in the pathogenesis or CFS/ME, neuroimmune, autoimmune and neoplastic disorders will not end today despite the negative results of the XMRV, pMLV study. I have CFS/ME and cancer. My data supports the presence and importance of retroviruses in the pathogenesis of both disorders and the potential for anti-retroviral drugs to help us.

My data shows the presence of a clonal T-lymphocyte expansion which is probably CD8 cells. Having a clonal T-lymphocyte expansion is abnormal.  In addition, I have increased monocytes (monocytosis). I have looked at 56 of my patients with various types of cancer and half of them also have a detectable T-lymphocyte expansion and monocytosis. My point is that what I see in myself may be a common phenomenon and actually may be happening in millions of people. I haven’t looked in CFS/ME, because I limit my practice to Hematology-Oncology.

T-lymphocytes and monocytes are important because they are permissive of retroviral invasion and because they are pre-programmed to make cytokines. Presumably the increased numbers of these cells after infection has occurred would lead to increased amounts of cytokines that would dysregulate the immune system. In addition, monocytes give rise to the microglial cells which migrate to the brain and spinal cord and potentially could deposit abnormal amounts of cytokines in direct proximity to the neural elements.

Dr. Lipkin mentioned a polyclonal expansion of B-lymphocytes as important in our type of disorder and this could be a result of the increased amount of cytokines. In fact, in my patients who had a clonal T-lymphocyte expansion and/or monocytosis, 50% had autoimmune markers. What is reasonable to postulate is that we now have explained the known connection between inflammation and cancer and neurodegenerative disorders and it all goes back to the retroviruses.

I have previously shown response of my leukemia, monocytosis and clonal T-cells to AZT, raltegravir and after relapse a second response to the addition of tenofovir. I had hoped to demonstrate that a PI would be valuable treatment and waited to add this category of drug until relapse. My leukemia responded and relapsed in parallel with the monocytosis and clonal T-cell expansion but at a somewhat different rate.

The last graph shows that the clonal T-lymphocytes, CD8 lymphocytes and monocytes were increasing after relapse on AZT, raltegravir and tenofovir. Quest discontinued doing the quantitative TCRγ in 2011. As a favor to me, Quest put it up but with different reagents so that the results from the new assay are not superimposable over 2011’s. Please note that the clonal TCRγ values are a ratio rather than an absolute number of cells.

I didn’t have the new clonal T-cell assay available until later in the graph and didn’t think of looking for CD8 cells initially. After the relapse was clearly documented, I added the PI, lopinavir. The T-cell parameters and monocytes continued to trend up for the next 4-8 weeks before clearly trending down.

The only reasonable explanation for what has happened to me and what I have found in half of my cancer patients is that retroviruses participate in the pathogenesis of our illnesses. Please note that I do not claim that the retroviruses cause the illnesses but emphasize that the retroviruses participate in the pathogenesis. The likelihood is that genetic susceptibility and toxic exposure determines whether an infected person would develop disease and how it would be manifested.

It is clear to me from the data I have, that many people have susceptibility to develop disease after infection with retroviruses. It is now up to the scientists to identify the infection and the basis of genetic susceptibility. Once there are easy methods to identify who is infected and with what, treatment trials could be started. We must go forward.

Michael Snyderman, MD

 

Click figures to enlarge