Delayed chronic fatigue syndrome paper to be published

Cross posted from Nature's The Great Beyond blog.

A highly anticipated paper linking viral infection with chronic fatigue syndrome will at last see the light.

The paper, to be published online later today by Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences USA (PNAS), is the first to back up a previous report that chronic fatigue syndrome may be linked to infection by a virus called XMRV (see ‘Virus linked to chronic fatigue syndrome’). Chronic fatigue patients and their advocates embraced the findings as a long-sought clue to the cause of the mysterious ailment, but several research teams have since tried and failed to reproduce this link.

The PNAS paper was originally accepted for publication on 27 May. But on 4 June, the authors, who work for the US National Institutes of Health and the US Food and Drug Administration, asked to delay publication while they considered conflicting results from a second paper authored by other government researchers. (For more see ‘Chronic fatigue findings were held back’.) That second paper appeared in the journal Retrovirology on 2 July, but there was still no sign of the first.

Read the rest of the post on The Great Beyond. Or for more background information, check out Nature Medicine’s timeline of the XMRV controversy.

via feeds.nature.com

Posted via email from Specialist Pain Physio