From the central nervous system to Long COVID to energy impairment, Dr. Anthony Komaroff provides his perspective on over 30 years of scientific research into myalgic encephalomyelitis/ chronic fatigue syndrome (ME/CFS) and post-acute viral illnesses.
By Bronc and Eric Pyrrhus
Dr. Anthony Komaroff is really on a roll. For a sometimes reserved academic, he’s been speaking out more and more lately. What has he been talking about, and why now? Phoenix Rising spoke with the good doctor, and summarizes some of his recent publications and interviews here.
For those who may be unfamiliar with him, Dr. Komaroff is a distinguished Professor of Medicine at Harvard Medical School and Senior Physician at Brigham and Women’s Hospital in Boston. He has published over 230 research articles and two books.
He has been publishing research papers on ME/CFS since the late 1980s, and currently serves on the U.S. National Institutes of Health’s advisory body for research into ME/CFS.
“Since the resurgence of interest in ME/CFS 35 years ago, whole new technologies have become available that allow physicians and biomedical scientists to study human biology in ways that previously were not possible,” explained Dr. Komaroff in a recent commentary.
“In fact, these and other technologies have revealed things that the standard laboratory tests cannot — abnormalities that previously were invisible to doctors.”
When we asked him which new developments in ME/CFS research stood out for him, he answered:
The underlying biological abnormalities in ME that seem to me the most well established involve the brain and autonomic nervous system, chronic activation and exhaustion of parts of the immune system, defects in energy metabolism and a general hypometabolic state, and abnormalities of the gut microbiome. I think it is likely that they are all real, and all connected to one another. To me, the most important research agenda is to understand how these abnormalities are connected to each other.
Read the rest of this article HERE.
Source: Phoenix Rising, August 22, 2021