New Research Will Benefit Four Million Americans Suffering from Chronic Fatigu...( CHARLOTTE N.C. Dec. 3 /- The four mil...),Health

CHARLOTTE, N.C., Dec. 3 /PRNewswire/ -- The four million Americans who suffer from chronic fatigue syndrome (CFS) have new reason for hope today with the announcement of an unprecedented research program to help identify biomarkers for the illness and improve diagnosis and treatment of CFS. The announcement was made by the CFIDS Association of America, which is funding the program, called the Accelerate CFS Research Initiative.

As part of this initiative, the CFIDS Association also announced today research grants totaling $647,940 to six research teams in the U.S. and Canada.

"These awards represent a new approach to CFS research," said Suzanne Vernon, PhD, the CFIDS Association's scientific director. "Instead of each investigator working in isolation, we are building a network of researchers and a framework for data sharing and collaboration not only among researchers who receive grants from the CFIDS Association, but among scientists worldwide."

Vernon, a microbiologist who helped pioneer the application of genomics to CFS, is now working to pioneer this new CFS research network and to direct the Accelerate CFS Research Initiative. "We were very impressed with the number and caliber of grant proposals we received this year, which signals a heightened level of interest in CFS research," said Vernon. "CFS, once shied away from by some researchers, is now considered a legitimate and challenging field of scientific inquiry."

The grant recipients are:

-- Gordon Broderick, PhD, of the University of Alberta in Canada, who will study the immune and endocrine response in adolescent patients who became ill with CFS after contracting infectious mononucleosis, which is caused by the Epstein-Barr virus. By studying patients from the time they get infectious mononucleosis to the development of CFS and through the first 24 months of illness, the researchers hope to identif
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