New projects on the electrical properties of white blood cells and visual sensory processing in ME/CFS
ME Research UK was delighted to announce two new grants for ME/CFS research over the last few of months, including a new PhD project.
Characterising the electrical properties of white blood cells
In 2019, Prof. Ron Davis from America reported that researchers had developed a nanoelectronics test that found a difference in impedance (i.e. the electrical characteristics) of white blood cells taken from people with ME/CFS compared with those from control subjects. Prof. Robert Dorey, Dr Fatima Labeed and colleagues at the University of Surrey plan to continue this avenue of research in a new study jointly funded by ME Research UK and the ME Association.
The team has already used a more robust approach to identify statistically significant differences between the electrical properties of blood from people with ME/CFS compared with healthy and multiple sclerosis (MS) controls (using samples from the UK ME/CFS Biobank). Their preliminary work suggests that the 2019 results from America are repeatable and can be explored in more detail. Furthermore, that they have the potential to be used as a routine diagnostic test.
The researchers will apply their improved approach to measure white blood cell impedance in a larger cohort of patients, including those with mild, moderate and severe ME/CFS, as well as healthy and MS controls. Their hope is that the results will lead towards the development of a reliable, repeatable and low-cost diagnostic tool using the electrical signature from a simple blood test. They also aim to identify the cellular changes that have occurred in order to create the electrical biomarker, and in so doing identify new avenues for potential treatments.
Read more here
The impact of ME/CFS on visual sensory processing
People with ME/CFS often report problems with their vision, including visual overload, difficulties filtering relevant from irrelevant visual information (also called selective attention), and fatigue during visual search. These problems have a debilitating effect on individuals’ quality of life, but very little is known about the way ME/CFS impacts the ability to perceive and prioritise objects and events.
This PhD project led by Dr Doug Barrett at the University of Leicester aims to look at how ME/CFS affects each of these aspects of visual function, and the research will be conducted by PhD student, Anosha Atlaf. The study will address three research questions: How does ME/CFS affect visual sensory processing? How does ME/CFS affect individuals’ ability to prioritise relevant over irrelevant visual information (selective attention)? Can carefully controlled tests of selective attention during visual search provide a diagnostic marker of ME/CFS?
Patients with ME/CFS will undergo visual stimulus tests to measure their responses to sensory inputs. Further tests will assess their ability to recognise targets from within a group of objects, and will also measure behavioural and eye movement markers, and electrical activity in the brain. The researchers’ hypothesis is that reduced nerve responses will make patients slower and less accurate in responding to visual stimuli.
The findings will be used to develop online tests that can be applied to a large sample of ME/CFS patients, to identify ME/CFS-related changes in the speed and accuracy of target detection, and the associations between these objective results and subjective reports of symptom severity and fatigue. The results of this study will provide detailed information about the way ME/CFS affects the sensory and cognitive components of an everyday visual task, and tests of selective attention may help provide potential, non-invasive diagnostic markers of ME/CFS and its severity.
Read more here
Submitted by Dr. David Newton
The ME Global Chronicle 