It’s day four of our #MayMomentum campaign and we are so appreciative of your efforts to raise awareness of and money for ME/CFS research! It’s only with your support that we can continue to push for answers by funding open, collaborative research efforts.

On behalf of Open Medicine Foundation (OMF), I’m excited to share an update from my colleague Dr. David Systrom and his colleagues at the Brigham and Women’s Hospital from a study using samples collected from people with ME/CFS using Invasive Cardiopulmonary Exercise Testing, or ICPET.

Background

You might recall from past articles, we’ve referenced a phenomenon called “preload heart failure.”

Simply put, preload failure (PLF) is when a patient during exercise exhibits impaired blood return to the heart. A significant subset of people with ME/CFS who were tested using ICPET experience PLF at maximum exercise. Aspects of this PLF are highly consistent with mechanisms that result in postural orthostatic tachycardia syndrome (POTS) and post-exertional malaise (PEM), both of which are common symptoms in people with ME/CFS.

Investigators of Harvard’s ME/CFS Collaboration are evaluating participant’s blood samples extracted at three separate time-points during cardiopulmonary exercise testing: before, at peak, and one-hour after exercise. The goal is to identify abnormalities when blood is pumped from the heart and when it’s returned to the heart through computational analyses of the “multi-omics” data. In this case, researchers will analyze plasma samples through cytokines, metabolomics, and proteomics.