For years, people with chronic fatigue have been told they’re acting like whiny hypochondriacs. That’s because there are a lot of symptoms that go with being really really tired, including joint pain, headaches, digestive problems, and abnormal blood pressure. The way these things vary from person to person has made it difficult to diagnose people with Chronic Fatigue Syndrome. But a team of radiologists at Stanford may have found three things to help identify CFS among those who are unsure if they really have the disease or if it’s all in their heads.

Michael Zeineh and colleagues studied brain images from 29 patients, 15 that had CFS, and 14 that didn’t. They found that the brains of CFS sufferers are different from those of healthy subjects in at least three distinct ways. First and foremost, people with CFS have white matter abnormalities in the right hemisphere of their brains. MRI showed that overall, people with CFS have diminished white matter. (White matter is what helps neurons transmit signals between the different regions of your brain.)

Chronic Fatigue has long been thought to involve some sort of inflammation, perhaps as a viral infection (that they haven’t pinpointed yet.) Inflammation is known to be detrimental to white matter. So, according to Zeineh, those findings weren’t unexpected.

They were surprised, however, to find abnormalities in the right arcuate fasciculus of CFS patients. (Your RAF connects your frontal lobe and your temporal lobe.) The more severe the disfiguration of this nerve tract, the more severe the person’s CFS symptoms.

The third finding was a thickening of the gray matter at the two areas of the brain connected by the right arcuate fasciculus. This, paired with the diminished white matter surrounding the area, makes it unlikely that the two things aren’t correlated.

“This study was a start,” [Zeineh] said. “It shows us where to look. If you don’t understand the disease, you’re throwing darts blindfolded.”

The Stanford group is now planning to expand its study. You can read the entire report at Radiology.

Via i09