1) Interesting interview of Prof. Brian Hughes by David Tuller. In his new book Hughes argues that psychology is not woke but that its methods are essentially conservative because it focuses on an individualistic view and ignores social context.

1) A new study looked at symptom exacerbations for 8 days after a 20-minute sub-maximal exercise test and compared ME/CFS and Long Covid patients with controls. Changes were greatest in ME/CFS patients and in the first 3 days after exercise.

1) Slide from Maya Dusenbery's presentation at the Canadian ME/CFS Conference yesterday. She is the author of 'Doing Harm', a book that explores how women’s health has long been overlooked and dismissed within the medical system.

1) 🇦🇺 Interesting interview with molecular biologist Dr Daniel Missailidis. He has been conducting ME/CFS research since 2016 at at La Trobe University, focusing on the intersection of energy metabolism and immune dysfunction.

For patients with Long Covid: you can now participate in a remote treatment trial of tirzepatide (a GLP-1 inhibitor also known as zepbound). The study is organized by Scripps Research and aims to enroll 1000 participants.

Looks like this trial actually showed that HBOT likely doesn't work in ME/CFS. They excluded 7/37 participants who dropped out They do not compare results to a control group Participants received 40 sessions And still, the improvement was only 6.3 points on the SF-36 PF scale

1) 🇩🇪 A new preprint by the Charité group reports improvements after 40 sessions of hyperbaric oxygen therapy in 30 ME/CFS patients. However, there was no control group, and the improvements were far from impressive.

1) 🇬🇧 The research team of Sarah Tyson has developed a Clinal Needs Assessment tool for ME/CFS patients. It's basically a list of check-box items to help patients and their clinical teams identify and better understand patients’ needs as part of a clinical assessment process.

This Medscape article by Myrian Tucker gives a summary of several presentations at the IACFS/ME meeting. Wormgoor et al. presented an update to her systematic review on physical activity interventions for ME/CFS. Of 17 trials, only one used a case definition that required PEM.

1) Researchers tested an new in-ear device to estimate blood flow to the brain. In an ME/CFS patient blood flow decreased by 23% after an exercise test compared to only 5% in the healthy control participant.

1) ME Research UK (MERUK) has made this useful overview of funding opportunities for ME/CFS researchers in the UK. It includes a lot of info about preparing an application and involving patients and carers.

1) Had a brief look at this preprint by David Putrino's group. It's a case series that reports improvement after IMC-2: a combination of the antiviral Valacyclovir and the anti-inflammatory drug Celecoxib.

1) More excellent work by the WE&ME Foundation. They have created ME/CFS fellowships: 6-month research stays with funding of up to € 40,000. The call is co-funded by the WWTF (a big non-profit in Vienna dedicated to research and science) and has a total budget of € 200.000.

1) Reading this review on fatigue in other diseases: it's notable how it manifests early in the illness (often before diagnosis), how it's often poorly explained (correlates poorly with pathology markers), yet is reported to be one of the most disabling symptoms.

1) Reading this review on fatigue in other diseases: it's notable how it manifests early in the illness (often before diagnosis), how it's often poorly explained (correlates poorly with pathology markers), yet is reported to be one of the most disabling symptoms.

1) Interesting study in the New England Journal of Medicine. 1% to 3% of patients with multiple sclerosis and inflammatory bowel disease were likely misdiagnosed as they actually had a monogenic rare disease.

1) 🇮🇳 Colchicine, an anti-inflammatory drug used to treat gout, was found to be ineffective for Long Covid. A placebo-controlled trial in JAMA Internal Medicine found that "colchicine did not improve functional capacity, respiratory function, or inflammatory markers."

Small tip: We usually add the academic reference for a study at the end of our thread. This way, you can quickly search our summary and comments about a paper by looking up the title and our handle on Bluesky.

1) A pilot study tested transcranial magnetic stimulation in 15 ME/CFS patients. It's a non-invasive treatment that repeatedly uses magnetic fields to influence brain activity. The hope is that it helps to recalibrate dysregulated neural networks.

1) Interesting new paper on the link between ME/CFS and HLA, the group of proteins that help the immune system differentiate your own cells from foreign invaders. The study found that HLA-variants associated with ME/CFS were less able to bind to human herpesviruses antigens.

1) New study reports that ME/CFS patients have increased levels of advanced oxidation protein products (AOPP) in the blood, a marker of oxidative stress. This was particularly the case for male ME/CFS patients who had higher AOPP levels than females.

1) Here's the reasoning behind the LIFT-study: a randomized trial of Mestinon (pyridostigmine) by David Systrom’s group at Harvard. They suspect Mestinon will result in increased constriction in the veins.

Thank you, ME/CFS blog, for these brilliant summaries and insights. If you are interested in ME/CFS research, and what's important within it, take a look (and consider following them).

1) It doesn't happen very often that an ME/CFS paper gets retracted. But the journal Food Science & Nutrition just retracted a study that claimed certain lipids contribute to the development of ME/CFS. It suggested that "dietary choices can potentially mitigate the syndrome."

1) The research team of Leonard Jason has published the DSQ-PEM-2, a new short questionnaire to assess post-exertional malaise (PEM). It includes extra questions about multiple PEM triggers, delayed onset, and prolonged recovery. But there are also some issues...

1) We watched the 2025 Stanford Symposium on ME/CFS and summarized many of the presentations. While it's great to see so many talented people focusing on ME/CFS, we also noted that a lot of research is focused on hypotheses that are not yet supported by strong evidence.

1) Dr. Vanessa Velasco gave preliminary results on OMF's new neutrophil study. She found that neutrophils of ME/CFS patients died quicker and more often than those of healthy controls, under inflammatory conditions.

Interesting, elegant study suggesting a possible reason #longCovid is more common among women. For Covid infected mice, prolonged cognitive problems (measured e.g. by maze tests) – a 'proxy' for long Covid- were more common among females. As was a stronger immune response. Relevant to ME/CFS?

1) Impressive study from Johns Hopkins researchers. They infected mice with SARS-CoV-2, found that female mice had a stronger immune response and more cognitive problems after 84 days than males, and that this was due to overexpression of genes such as Tlr7 on the X chromosome.

. @scienceforme.bsky.social update: “ME/CFS Science blog delves deeper into the DecodeME results & the genes associated with ME/CFS, concluding "The clearest signals point to genes such as CA10, SHISA6, SOX6, LRRC7, & DCC, which are involved in neuronal development & communication in the brain”

1) The most interesting presentation during the 2025 Stanford symposium was on PET scans of the entire body. Dr. Michelle James explained that they found a striking pattern with more TSPO signal in various muscle groups of ME/CFS patients, such as the thigh and shoulders.

1) Dr. Robert Naviaux’s theory is that the mitochondrial dysfunction observed in ME/CFS isn’t actually a dysfunction. The mitochondria are doing precisely as they are instructed by signals in the blood and from the brain.

1) During the Stanford Community Symposium, Dr. Randall Peterson explained how his team at the University of Utah has recreated the Itaconate shunt model of ME/CFS in zebrafish. They found that these fish swim less and have reduced oxygen consumption.

1) Remember the intramural NIH study about effort preference in ME/CFS? Today, a letter from several experts in the field was published in the journal Nature Communications, criticising the conclusions of the original paper.

1) Not new, but only learned about it today: The group of Prof. Simon Carding at the Quadram Institute is doing a small trial of Photobiomodulation (PBM) for ME/CFS, called 'LightMEup'.

Dr. Fridbjörn Sigurdsson was a medical oncologist before focusing on ME/CFS. During the 2025 Invest in ME conference, he said: "What I have learned is that most of the patients that I have seen with ME are so much sicker than my cancer patients."

1) 🇬🇧 The NIHR and MRC are hosting a free showcase event for research on post-acute infection conditions, including ME/CFS and long COVID. It takes place in London on November 6, 10 am - 4:30 pm GMT.

1) During his presentation at the 2025 Invest in ME conference in May, Dr. Jesper Mehlsen from Denmark said that he was working on a European treatment plan for ME/CFS. He's collaborating on this with colleagues Dag Gundersen Storla (Norway) and Jonas Axelsson (Sweden).

By pointing to neurons in the brain, DecodeME provided another piece of the puzzle in understanding ME/CFS. The big challenge is how to connect this to an immune trigger, as ME/CFS often follows an infection such as EBV or COVID-19.

Great summary of David Teller interviewing Chris Ponting about the new PRIME initiative to boost ME research in the UK and worldwide. This aims to for international consortia for genetics and for molecular biomarkers. Plus 15 new UK research collaborations. Plus conferences/workshops.

1) Another interesting interview of Prof Chris Ponting by David Tuller. They talked about PRIME, a new 4-year project that will provide an infrastructure to accelerate ME/CFS research. It received 0.8 million in funding from the Medical Research Council (MRC).

1) 🇬🇧 For ME/CFS patients in the UK only: Action for ME has opened its 2025 Big Survey! Last time, it had more than 4000 respondents, but hopefully this one will be even bigger. The deadline for submitting your response is 27 January 2026.

UK Action for ME Big Survey 2025 The 5 yearly survey of people in the UK with ME/CFS will open on Monday 13th October. It has been developed by AfME in collaboration with @kacheston.bsky.social Dr Katherine Cheston at Durham University. www.actionforme.org.uk/research-cam... #MEcfs #PwME #CFS

Reminder: The DecodeME team want to do a related genetic study with the samples they have collected already but unfortunately don’t have the funding yet: megenetics.org.uk/our-projects... #MEcfs #PwME #CFS

Would be interested in hearing if there are any patterns in the candidate genes that we missed that other people are exploring?

1) We’ve just published our second instalment on the DecodeME results, this timing zooming in on the genes associated with ME/CFS.

1) The Physios for ME team published a randomized trial on pacing with a heart rate monitor. It included 32 patients with ME/CFS and 15 with Long Covid. A brief breakdown of the main results 🧵

@cathleenogrady.bwww.science covers the rise of shoddy public health papers for @science.org www.science.org/content/arti...

The research used to claim reliability of a ME/CFS blood test has important limitations, shown here. www.theguardian.com/society/2025...

1) There's a new ME/CFS study that is getting a lot of attention in the media. It focuses on epigenetics: how genes are switched on or off by folding DNA in a different way. You genetic code itself is fixed but the expression of genes can change by environmental factors.