ME Association position statement: XMRV testing at Imperial College, London
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Following an extraordinary move by Imperial College, London to offer testing for XMRV infection at £200 a pop (ICL must be very confident their test will return no positives), the ME Association issues a position statement:
ME Association | 05 February 2010
XMRV testing at Imperial College, London
Imperial College, the research centre in the UK that has found no evidence of XMRV infection in any of the blood samples from people with ME/CFS that they have looked at, has announced that their Molecular Diagnostics Unit is now offering their method for XMRV testing to the public: Imperial College announcement
MEA POSITION STATEMENT
Until we have the results from more replication studies the link between XMRV and ME/CFS remains speculative and unproven. We do not therefore believe that there is any point in spending money on an expensive blood test which is not, at present, going to act as either a diagnostic marker or an aid to management. And any laboratory offering this test to the public has an ethical duty to make these points clear.
We would, however, be interested to hear from anyone in the UK who does decide to have an XMRV test.
The latest MEA summary on XMRV can be found here
A summary of the Imperial College research which looked for XMRV in ME/CFS can be found here
We hope that the situation regarding XMRV and ME/CFS will become clear once results from the other replication studies appear in the scientific journals over the coming months.
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