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Anti-lymphoma drug is effective in combating chronic fatigue syndrome
Last reviewed: 30.06.2025
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Anti-lymphoma drug effective in combating chronic fatigue syndrome, researchers say, supporting the hypothesis that the condition may be caused by immune problems.
Anti-cancer drug relieves chronic fatigue syndrome, according to an article on the PLoS ONE website. Scientists from the University of Bergen (Norway) noted that rituximab, a drug against lymphoma, relieved symptoms of chronic fatigue syndrome in 10 out of 15 patients.
Rituximab is an antibody that binds to mature B cells. This causes excess “tumor” B cells to be destroyed. The researchers were somewhat fortunate that the university hospital had lymphoma patients who also suffered from chronic fatigue. Two of them, who had been treated with the drug for the past three years, have completely recovered from the neurological disorder.
Although this study does not have a lot of statistics, several important conclusions can be drawn from the results. The first is that chronic fatigue syndrome is caused by an overproduction of antibodies, which occurs from an excess of B lymphocytes. These antibodies can mistakenly attack the body's own tissues. This explains why rituximab, according to the researchers, began to work several months after the first dose: it removed the excess B cells in a couple of weeks, but the antibodies that these cells managed to synthesize wandered through the bloodstream for another two or three months. As soon as these antibodies were naturally destroyed, the effect of the drug became noticeable.
The second conclusion the researchers make in their paper is that chronic fatigue syndrome probably cannot be blamed on a virus. A popular hypothesis is that the disease is caused by XMRV, the mouse leukemia virus. The authors were unable to find any traces of this virus in the patients who took part in the study. Moreover, some time ago it turned out that previous results linking this virus to chronic fatigue syndrome were largely erroneous: the virus was introduced from outside the experiment and had nothing to do with the symptoms of the disease.
Given the sad fate of these studies, the authors of the article call for greater caution in drawing conclusions about the causes of the syndrome. For starters, they want to know why this drug did not work for all patients with chronic fatigue. Although, according to scientists, it may be a matter of dosage.
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