Research: Patients with Chronic Fatigue Syndrome Have Reduced Absolute Cortical Blood Flow

March 2, 2006

Research: Patients with Chronic Fatigue Syndrome Have Reduced Absolute

Cortical Blood Flow

ImmuneSupport.com

03-01-2006

Clin Physiol Funct Imaging. 2006 Mar;26(2):83-6.

Yoshiuchi K, Farkas J, Natelson BH. Department of Neurosciences, Fatigue

Research Center, UMDNJ-New Jersey Medical School, Newark, NJ, USA. Summary

Prior studies on brain blood flow in chronic fatigue syndrome (CFS) did not find

consistent results. This may be because they used single-photon emission

computed tomography to measure brain blood flow, which could not measure

absolute blood flow. Therefore, the aim of this study was to test the

hypothesis that patients with CFS have reduced absolute cerebral blood flow.

Xenon-computed tomography blood flow studies were done on 25 CFS patients and

seven healthy controls. Analyses were done after stratifying the CFS patients

based on the presence or absence of a current psychiatric disorder. Flow was

diminished in both groups as follows: patients with no current psychiatric

disorders had reduced cortical blood flow in the distribution of both right and

left middle cerebral arteries (P<0.05 for both) while those with current

psychiatric disorders had reduced blood flow only in the left middle cerebral

artery territory (P<0.05). These data indicate that patients with CFS have

reduced absolute cortical blood flow in rather broad areas when compared with

data from healthy controls and that those devoid of psychopathology had the most

reductions in cortical flow. These data support, in part, our earlier findings

that patients devoid of psychopathology are the group most at risk of having

some of the symptoms of CFS due to brain dysfunction. PMID: 16494597 [PubMed -

in process]

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Jimi Hendrix

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