Publications by authors named "Elizabeth G Balbin"
Article Synopsis
- The MCAM study aimed to see if different clinicians recognized myalgic encephalomyelitis/chronic fatigue syndrome (ME/CFS) as the same clinical condition by analyzing data from 465 patients across seven specialized clinics in the U.S.
- Research found minimal significant differences in ME/CFS symptoms and functionalities among patients from various clinics, indicating a possible inherent illness heterogeneity.
- The study suggests that representing data visually (like scatter plots) could better illustrate this variation, and emphasizes the need for more detailed subgroup analyses in future research to enhance understanding and reproducibility of ME/CFS findings.
Potentially linked to the basic physiology of stress response, Gulf War Illness (GWI) is a debilitating condition presenting with complex immune, endocrine and neurological symptoms. Here we interrogate the immune response to physiological stress by measuring 16 blood-borne immune markers at 8 time points before, during and after maximum exercise challenge in = 12 GWI veterans and = 11 healthy veteran controls deployed to the same theater. Immune markers were combined into functional sets and the dynamics of their joint expression described as classical rate equations.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFPurpose: The complex and varied presentation of myalgic encephalomyelitis/chronic fatigue syndrome (ME/CFS) has made it difficult to diagnose, study, and treat. Its symptoms and likely etiology involve multiple components of endocrine and immune regulation, including the hypothalamic-pituitary-adrenal axis, the hypothalamic-pituitary-gonadal axis, and their interactive oversight of immune function. We propose that the persistence of ME/CFS may involve changes in the regulatory interactions across these physiological axes.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFArticle Synopsis
- The Multi-Site Clinical Assessment of Myalgic Encephalomyelitis/Chronic Fatigue Syndrome (MCAM) involves expert clinician diagnoses to gather data on ME/CFS from 7 specialty clinics across the US.
- The main goals include using questionnaires to measure illness impacts, assessing the course of the illness, and evaluating differences among patients, alongside a focus on treatments and lab tests used by clinicians.
- Enrollment started in 2012 and will continue until 2017, with an initial group of 471 ME/CFS patients already assessed in the first stage of the study.
Background: Validation of biomarkers for myalgic encephalomyelitis/chronic fatigue syndrome (ME/CFS) across data sets has proven disappointing. As immune signature may be affected by many factors, our objective was to explore the shift in discriminatory cytokines across ME/CFS subjects separated by duration of illness.
Methods: Cytokine expression collected at rest across multiple studies for female ME/CFS subjects (i) 18 years or younger, ill for 2 years or less (n = 18), (ii) 18-50 years of age, ill for 7 years (n = 22), and (iii) age 50 years or older (n = 28), ill for 11 years on average.
The purpose of this study was to determine the reliability and validity of an instrument that measures both spirituality and religiousness, to examine the relation between spirituality and religiousness and important health outcomes for people living with HIV and to examine the potential mediators of these relations. One aim was to determine whether subscales of spirituality, religiousness, or both would be independently related to long survival in people living with AIDS. The Ironson-Woods Spirituality/Religiousness (SR) Index is presented with evidence for its reliability and validity.
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