Anti-lymphoma drug is effective in fighting chronic fatigue syndrome
Last reviewed: 23.04.2024
All iLive content is medically reviewed or fact checked to ensure as much factual accuracy as possible.
We have strict sourcing guidelines and only link to reputable media sites, academic research institutions and, whenever possible, medically peer reviewed studies. Note that the numbers in parentheses ([1], [2], etc.) are clickable links to these studies.
If you feel that any of our content is inaccurate, out-of-date, or otherwise questionable, please select it and press Ctrl + Enter.
Anti-lymphoma drug is effective in fighting chronic fatigue syndrome. According to researchers, this confirms the hypothesis that this syndrome can be a consequence of problems with immunity.
An anti-cancer drug relieves chronic fatigue syndrome, according to an article on the PLoS ONE website. Scientists from the University of Bergen (Norway) noticed that rituximab, a medicine against lymphoma, relieved the symptoms of chronic fatigue syndrome in 10 of 15 patients.
Rituximab is an antibody that binds to mature B cells. This leads to the fact that the excess of "tumor" B-lymphocytes is destroyed. The researchers were fortunate in some ways to have patients in the university hospital among patients with lymphoma who also suffer from chronic fatigue. Two of them, who received the drug the last three years, completely got rid of this neurological disorder.
Although this work does not have a lot of statistics, several important conclusions can be drawn from the results obtained. The first sounds like this: the syndrome of chronic fatigue is caused by the reproduction of antibodies, which results from the excess of B-lymphocytes. These antibodies can mistakenly attack the body's own tissues. This explains why rituximab, according to the researchers, started functioning several months after the first intake: it removed extra B cells for a couple of weeks, but the antibodies that these cells had synthesized wandered along the bloodstream for a couple of more months. As soon as these antibodies were naturally destroyed, the action of the drug became noticeable.
The second conclusion that the researchers make in this article is that in the syndrome of chronic fatigue, apparently, one can not blame the virus. There is a popular hypothesis that this disease is caused by XMRV, a mouse leukemia virus. The authors could not find any traces of this virus in patients who took part in the studies. Moreover, some time ago it was found out that the previous results linking this virus to the chronic fatigue syndrome turned out to be largely erroneous: the virus was introduced during the experiment from the outside and had nothing to do with the symptoms of the disease.
Given the sad fate of these works, the authors of the article call for more caution with conclusions about the causes of the syndrome. First they want to know why this medication did not affect all patients with chronic fatigue. Although, according to scientists, it may be the case here in the dosage.
[