Chris Armstrong and the Hunt for the Metabolic Underpinnings of ME/CFS

Simone_Em_Aus

Cort Johnson published a terrific summary of the research that Chris Armstrong is doing with Open Medicine Foundation Australia. Emerge Australia is proud to be a partner in OMFA!

https://www.healthrising.org/blog/2021/10/17/chris-armstrong-chronic-fatigue-syndrome-metabolism/

It’s a long article, covering several different studies. Here’s a summary of the studies Chris has on the boil:

Longitudinal study looking at metabolomics on good days vs bad days.
Hungry cells: ME/CFS cells will be put into different media and tracked to see which ones our cells start sucking up, to determine what’s missing in our cells, and hopefully provide some insight into what’s going wrong.
Nitrogen hypothesis: because people with ME/CFS use a lot of amino acids for energy this should mean that we excrete lots of nitrogen, except that elevated elimination of safe form of nitrogen hasn’t been found, so Chris suspects that we’re eliminating nitrogen in an unsafe form (ammonia). This study will be looking at where nitrogen is going.
Oculomotor study: tracking eye movement can reflect neurological issues. Already this study has yielded some interesting findings and Chris is hopeful it could result in a diagnostic tool.

Phew! He’s super busy! Fingers crossed we get some good results from these!

river

So cool! Thank you for the summary, I don't have the energy to read the full article today.
Is the thing about using a lot of amino acids for energy something that has emerged from this research? Or something that was already known? I would like to know more about it

Glimmer

@Simone_Em_Aus More promising news. I’m a big fan of Cort; he does amazing work for the CFS community. And to now have an Aussie, Dr Armstrong on board is a huge bonus. Interesting about eye tracking. I get a lot of eye blurring, as do others. And comments re ammonia and body odours an interesting read too.

Simone_Em_Aus

@river said in Chris Armstrong and the Hunt for the Metabolic Underpinnings of ME/CFS:

So cool! Thank you for the summary, I don't have the energy to read the full article today.

Yes, I totally get the difficulty with reading the full article, and it is long! Worth a read later if you’re up to it. It’s broken up into short sections, so you could spread them out and read them one at a time, if you wanted to.

Is the thing about using a lot of amino acids for energy something that has emerged from this research? Or something that was already known? I would like to know more about it

The use of amino acids for energy has come from Chris and others’ metabolomics research, which shows that our energy pathways don’t work properly. Chris is applying what research has already shown us to try to understand more about it.