In today’s interview, Dr. Chris Armstrong and Dr. Wenzhong Xiao, two of OMF’s Directors, talk about what they think is going on in ME/CFS, including differences in producing energy and the immune and central nervous systems being out of balance. They also discuss connections between their research.
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The Heart of the Matter
- In an interview with Dr. Chris Armstrong and Dr. Wenzhong Xiao, two of OMF’s Directors, they talk about what they think is going on in ME/CFS, including differences in producing energy and the immune and central nervous systems being out of balance.
- Then, they discuss connections between their research:
- Xiao and Dr. Armstrong have both found that people with ME/CFS and Long COVID metabolize, or change, molecules in the body differently than other people. They are trying to use these changes to find new or better ways to diagnose and treat people with ME/CFS and related diseases.
- They are both also trying to find more effective treatments based on a person’s symptoms and other biological factors, which is an area called personalized or precision medicine.
Dr. Chris Armstrong, the Director of OMF’s Melbourne ME/CFS Collaboration, brings expertise in metabolism and precision medicine to his work on ME/CFS. In this interview, he provides a high-level overview of his hypothesis of ME/CFS, indicating that it is a general inefficiency in energy production. He mentions that that inefficiency is influenced by blood flow, issues in the gut, and more, and comorbidities and immune activations contribute to the problem as high energy-consuming factors.
Dr. Wenzhong Xiao, the Director of OMF’s Computational Research Center for Complex Diseases, brings expertise in computational genomics and the intersection of computation and medicine to his research on ME/CFS. In this interview, he reiterates the energy inefficiency hypothesis described by Dr. Armstrong and adds more about the dysregulation of the immune system and the central nervous system contributing to the disease.
In drawing connections between their research Drs. Armstrong and Xiao talked about a couple of common threads they’ve identified:
- Metabolism alterations: Dr. Xiao’s computational work has identified metabolic dysregulation in ME/CFS and Long COVID, which is consistent with some findings from Dr. Armstrong’s work, showing changes in amino acid and lipid metabolism. The changes they identified also connect to their work in the areas of differential diagnosis and finding effective treatments.
- Precision medicine: Dr. Xiao’s analysis of data from the TreatME survey identified symptom-based subgroups that respond differently to the same treatment. This directly aligns with Dr. Armstrong’s Personalized Treatment Trial project, which is trying to cluster participants to get at an effective way to personalize treatment protocols.
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