GULF WAR .ILLNESS
  Submitted by Denise Nichols, Chairwoman Gulf War Illness

Article Published December, 2005
(URL: http://www.biomedcentral.com/contents/5/1/22)


©2005 Baraniuk et al., licensee BioMed Central Ltd.

This is an Open Access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.
A Chronic Fatigue Syndrome - related proteome in human cerebrospinal fluid
 by James N. Baraniuk, Begona Casado, Hilda Maibach, Daniel J. Clauw, Lewis K. Pannell, and Sonja Hess

ABSTRACT:

Background

Chronic Fatigue Syndrome (CFS), Persian Gulf War Illness (PGI), and fibromyalgia are overlapping sympton complexes without objective markers or known pathophysiology. Neurological dysfunction is common. We assessed cerebrospinal fluid to find proteins that were differentially expressed in this CFS-spectrum of illnesses compared to control subjects.

Methods

Cerebrospinal fluid specimens from 10 CFS, 10 PGI, and 10 control subjects (50/mul/subject) were pooled into one sample per group (cohort 1). Cohort 2 of 12 control and 9 CFS subjects had their fluids (200 mul/subject) assessed individually. After trypsin digestion, peptides were analyzed by capillary chromatography, quadrupole-time-of-flight mass spectrometry, peptide sequencing, bioinformatic protein identification, and statistical analysis.

Results

Pooled CFS and PGI samples shared 20 proteins that were not detectable in the pooled control sample (cohort 1 CFS-related proteome). Multilogistic regression analysis (GLM) of cohort 2 detected 10 proteins that were shared by CFS individuals and the cohort 1 CFS-related proteome, but were not detected in control samples. Detection of >1 of a select set of 5 CFS-related proteins predicted CFS status with 80% concordance (logistic model). The proteins were alpha-1-macroglobulin, amyloid precursor-like protein 1, keratin 16, orosomucoid 2 and pigment epithelium-derived factor.

Conclusion

This pilot study detected an identical set of central nervous system, innate immune and amyloidogenic proteins in cerebrospinal fluids from two independent cohorts of subjects with overlapping CFS, PGI and fibromyalgia. Although syndrome names and definitions were different, the proteome and presumed pathological mechanism(s) may be shared.