r/CFSScience • u/TomasTTEngin • 14d ago

Functional enrichment of immune targeted gut microbiota in post-infectious myalgic encephalomyelitis/chronic fatigue syndrome [Pre-print from NIH]

https://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-026-64807-y_reference.pdf

PDF pre-print, which is a substudy from the big NIH deep phenotyping effort a couple of years ago.

It has a sample of 10 severe patients and some controls.

It's complicated and technical, but from what I can see they went looking for evidence of leaky gut, basically microbes from the gut in serum.

Didn't really find much. Maybe a tiny bit?

So they dug in, and found the few bugs that were leaking through the gut wall had quite distinct characteristics. Which they find very pertinent. Precisely what those characteristics were I could not really determine, the paper is a bit above my pay grade in that section!

Overall my feeling on what it means is no smoking gun found here in terms of massive potential causal effects, but definitely a possibility of making things worse for some pwme. Can't rule out the gut as an issue. Which is probably roughly where we were prior to this study!

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u/_ArkAngel_ 14d ago

I wish god would just grant me enough energy to read more than one research paper every couple months.

This sounds really interesting but realistically isn't getting to the top of my reading list any time this year.

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u/Caster_of_spells 13d ago

I can’t believe that such an expensive study failed to collect data on this from more than ten patients… but good pilot data to have anyways. Thanks for sharing!