Original articlesBrain 5-HT1A receptor binding in chronic fatigue syndrome measured using positron emission tomography and [11C]WAY-100635
Section snippets
Subjects
Ten patients (eight men and two women) with chronic fatigue syndrome were recruited from an established CFS referral clinic at King-s College Hospital, London (Table 1). All clinic attenders were assessed using a thorough semistructured examination (Sharpe et al 1997a) at initial consultation to evaluate CFS and the presence of additional psychiatric disorder. Patients were included if they fulfilled both international consensus criteria for CFS (i.e., the Oxford criteria; Sharpe et al 1991)
Binding potential
To explore the effects of subject group and region on BP measures, we entered all 41 ROI measurements (left and right values for 20 brain areas and the raphe nuclei) into a repeated-measures ANOVA with region as the within-subject factor and group as the between-subjects factor. To explore the effects of laterality, we entered only the 40 ROI measures that were bilateral (i.e., the raphe measure was excluded) and added laterality as an additional, binary, within subject factor; because this
Discussion
The main finding from this study is of a widespread reduction in BP values for [11C]WAY-100635 in a carefully selected group of medication-free patients with CFS and no current comorbid psychiatric disorder, including depression. This reduction was particularly marked in the hippocampus bilaterally. This is the first study to our knowledge that has used neuroimaging to measure 5-HT receptors in CFS.
The reduced BP observed with [11C]WAY 100635 suggests either a reduction in the number of 5-HT1A
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