Female Volunteers for Clinical study

[Guest guest]

MED: (Female) Volunteers sought for a new clinical study on role of

cytokines in sleep (in CFS)

> Found this at: http://www.cfids.org/community/bulletin-board.asp

>

> New clinical study on role of cytokines in sleep

>

> A group of researchers at the New Jersey Medical School is studying the

> role of cytokines in sleep in CFS patients. This three-and-a-half-year

> study is funded by the National Institutes of Health (NIH).

>

> Principal investigator Natelson, M.D., explains the goal: " One

> of the major hypotheses for the cause of CFS is immunological

> dysfunction, but no firm data exist to confirm this hypothesis. We

> believe this is the case for two reasons: prior researchers have never

> studied cytokines during the nighttime, and they have never tried to

> understand the role of the cytokines in producing restful or restless

> sleep. Many CFS patients have disrupted sleep, and we hypothesize that

> this occurs because of abnormalities in the pattern of sleep-disrupting

> and sleep-producing cytokines in some patients. "

>

> Dr. Natelson and his research team are recruiting 80 CFS patients for

> the study. All will be women and must be between the ages of 25 and 50.

> Women are being studied because CFS is predominantly an illness of

> women, because researchers want to exclude subjects with primary sleep

> disorders that occur mostly in men, and because women have

> substantially higher levels of cytokines than men.

>

> Participants can't take any brain-active medications at the time of the

> study because of their effect on sleep and the immune system. Because

> depression alters cytokines, women with depression will be excluded

> from the study. Patients will be compensated with $100 per night, but

> no travel or lodging expenses are covered.

>

> CFS patients will be matched by age and gender with 80 healthy

> controls. The study will require CFS patients to spend three nights in

> the sleep laboratory. The first night is designed to deal with the

> well-known " first-night effect " so subjects can become habituated to

> the sleep lab. A few days later CFS patients will return for a second

> night when researchers will measure sleep-disrupting cytokines and

> sleep-producing cytokines. Patients will return again to perform an

> exercise test in the afternoon, followed by a third night in the sleep

> lab so researchers can test blood to see how exercise perturbs

> cytokines.

>

> " We anticipate that exercise, which is known to exacerbate CFS

> symptoms, will worsen an already dysregulated cytokine sleep network, "

> explains Dr. Natelson.

>

> The researchers will study a group of CFS patients who have disrupted

> sleep and another group that are found to sleep without disruption.

> Like the patients, healthy controls will either sleep without

> disruption, or the researchers will disturb their sleep to match them

> to CFS patients in the disturbed sleep group. This design will enable

> researchers to determine whether the illness (CFS) rather than a

> symptom of the illness (disturbed

> sleep) is responsible for altered cytokine patterns.

>

> If you are interested in volunteering for this study, call 973-395-7900

> or send an e-mail to <deleting this to help him avoid getting spam -

> click URL at top of E-mail to get it>.