The Jackson Laboratory has just released a new feature article about ME/CFS on their website to increase awareness about the disease. The feature article, which highlights the recently established JAX CRC that’s being led by Derya Unutmaz, MD, delves into some of the issues that patients face in receiving diagnosis for the disease and in finding doctors who will give them proper care to manage their symptoms, and also includes details about how the microbiome and immune system are being studied by the CRC to determine the root cause of ME/CFS.

Some different perspectives surrounding the disease are shown in the feature article as well, with a video focusing on the day-to-day obstacles faced by Shannon, an ME/CFS patient, and her parents and caregivers, Jim and Patricia. Dr. Lucinda Bateman, the Founder of Bateman Horne Center, which is the clinical core for the JAX CRC, describes the common symptoms experienced by ME/CFS patients, and explains how these symptoms can greatly affect the ability of people with the disease to function normally. Dr. Morris Papernik of ProHealth Physicians describes how the lack of knowledge about ME/CFS has led to difficulty in treatment of ME/CFS by the medical field. A separate video interview with Julia Oh, PhD explains how the microbiome is intimately linked to the immune system, and is important to study in ME/CFS.

Derya Unutmaz and the rest of the CRC at JAX hope to use systems biology to combine data from the immune system, microbiome, and metabolism to generate a comprehensive picture of ME/CFS at the molecular level.

To read the JAX feature article, click here.