Find out how you can contribute to our 2025 Big Survey - a vital research project aiming to illustrate the impact of ME and long Covid.

Find out how you can contribute to our 2025 Big Survey - a vital research project aiming to illustrate the impact of ME and long Covid.

The PRIME project is looking for an experienced and dedicated project manager. This role will be crucial to the successful delivery of PRIME, with the post holder responsible for the strategic executi...

The ME Association are pleased to announce that we have […]

An update from Dr Audrey Ryback's research, testing the effect of serum from people with ME on muscle cell mitochondria, and findings.

Myalgic Encephalomyelitis (ME)/Chronic Fatigue Syndrome is a disease of uncertain aetiology that affects up to 400,000 individuals in the UK. Exposure of cultured cells to the sera of people with ME has been proposed to cause phenotypic changes in these cells in vitro when compared to sera from healthy controls. ME serum factors causing these changes could inform the development of diagnostic tests. In this study, we performed a large-scale, pre-registered replication of an experiment from Fluge et al (2016) that reported an increase in maximal respiratory capacity in healthy myoblasts after treatment with serum from people with ME compared to serum from healthy controls. We replicated the original experiment with a larger sample size, using sera from 67 people with ME and 53 controls to treat healthy cultured myoblasts, and generated results from over 1,700 mitochondrial stress tests performed with a Seahorse Bioanalyser. We observed no significant differences between treatment with ME or healthy control sera for our primary outcome of interest, oxygen consumption rate at maximal respiratory capacity. Results from our study provide strong evidence against the hypothesis that ME blood factors differentially affect healthy myoblast mitochondrial phenotypes in vitro. ### Competing Interest Statement The authors have declared no competing interest. Action for ME, https://ror.org/0569v7v35, Clare Francis Research Fellowship

Background Long COVID is a major public health burden causing a diverse array of debilitating symptoms in tens of millions of patients globally. In spite of this overwhelming disease prevalence and st...