Feeling tired is common when you work long hours, have family problems or are stressed. But if you are fatigued for six months or more and no known disease is the culprit, you may have chronic fatigue syndrome, the debilitating condition once dismissed as “yuppie flu.
Possible cancer link, virus
A recently discovered virus, xenotropic murine leukemia, was found to be common in patients with prostate cancer or chronic fatigue, according to a new study published in the journal Science at the beginning of this month.
Researchers from the US National Cancer Institute analyzed blood taken from 101 chronic fatigue patients and found 68 percent tested positive for the virus, compared with only 3.7 percent of the 218 healthy control subjects.
Some characteristics of the virus match the syndrome’s symptoms, researchers said. Mny related viruses cause blood vessels around the body to leak, a common symptom in chronic fatigue patients.
Researchers also noted that in mice, a protein that coats the shell of the virus caused the animals’ nerves o degenerate. A group of immune cells called natural killer cells, thought to be at the root of chronic fatigue, are known to be susceptible to the virus.
The new research was led by Judy Mikovits at the Whittemore Peterson Institute in Reno, Nevada, US after the virus was reported in 2006 to be present in tumor tissue taken from patients with hereditary prostate cancer.
