An interesting webinar featuring Amy Proal, PhD, of Microbe Minded was hosted a few weeks ago by Solve ME/CFS Initiative (SMCI), and the video was later posted on their Youtube channel. Amy, who was recently awarded a Ramsay grant from SMCI for her research, also published an article in Frontiers in Pediatrics in December 2018 about ME/CFS. The SMCI webinar focuses on the Frontiers article’s theory that chronic symptoms in ME/CFS are driven by the presence of persistent pathogens that affect the metabolism, gene expression, and immune system.

Amy describes how she considers ME/CFS to be a polymicrobial disease, in that pathogens associated with disease live as part of the complex microbiome communities in the body and interact with these communities to push other members of the microbiome into dysbiosis, which in turn causes symptoms. Amy believes that this can cause a snowball effect where successive infections with different pathogens build on each other to ultimately cause disease, and that this model could also explain why when presented with the same pathogen, some people develop ME/CFS while others don’t. She also discusses how recent Alzheimer’s research that explores new treatment possibilities could also be beneficial to people with ME/CFS.

To watch the SMCI webinar, click here.
To read the Frontiers in Pediatrics article, click here.