Infectious Causes of Chronic Fatigue Syndrome Infectious Causes of Chronic Fatigue Syndrome

Infectious Causes of Chronic Fatigue Syndrome Numerous studies have demonstrated a high incidence of chronic infections in chronic fatigue syndrome and fibromyalgia. These include viral infections of Epstein bar (EBV), cytomegalovirus (CMV), human h rpes virus6, (HHV-6), and bacterial infections such as mycoplasma, chlamydia pneumonia (CP) and Borrelia burgdorferi (Lyme disease). There is controversy regarding the presence of active infection in these conditions because physicians, including infectious disease specialists, do not understand that the standard way to diagnose acute infections, an elevation of IgG and IgM antibodies, is not a sensitive means of detecting chronic infections in these patients (1,2,3,4,5,6,7,8,9 ,10,11,12,13,14,15,16,17,18,19,20,21). With an acute infection, the body will start producing IgM antibodies against that infection and then start producing IgG antibodies after a few weeks so there is an elevation of both IgG and IgM antibodies. Chronic reactivating infection, such as those mentioned above, do not stimulate IgM antibodies as they are not new infections but rather intracellular reactivating infections, so most doctors, again including infectious disease specialists, will tell patients who have elevated IgG antibodies that they had an old infection or previous exposure and that there is no evidence of or they do not have an active infection because that is what they learned in medical school. This standard way of detecting active infections has clearly been shown to be inaccurate and miss the overwhelming majority of patients with active infections (1,2,3,4,5,6,7,8,9,10,1 1,12,13,14,15,16, 17,18, 19,20,21).