Gamer, Jackson, Van Booven, Derek, Zarnowski, Oskar et al. · Methods in molecular biology (Clifton, N.J.) · 2025 · DOI
Researchers studied how the immune system of ME/CFS patients responds to exercise by examining blood cells before, during, and after a physical challenge. They compared these responses in ME/CFS patients to healthy people using advanced genetic testing. This study is part of ongoing efforts to understand what makes ME/CFS different at a biological level and why exercise can make symptoms worse.
Understanding how ME/CFS patients' immune systems respond abnormally to exercise is crucial for explaining post-exertional malaise (PEM), the hallmark symptom that severely limits activity tolerance. Identifying specific genetic and immune changes triggered by physical stress could help validate ME/CFS as a biological illness and guide future treatments targeting these pathways.
This study does not prove that specific genetic changes *cause* ME/CFS or PEM—it identifies associations that warrant further investigation. As a methods and discovery-phase study, findings require independent validation before clinical applications can be established. The study does not establish whether transcriptomic changes are unique to ME/CFS or present in other conditions.
About the PEM badge: “PEM required” means post-exertional malaise was an explicit required diagnostic criterion for participant inclusion in this study — not that PEM was studied, observed, or discussed. Studies using criteria that do not require PEM (e.g. Fukuda, Oxford) are tagged “PEM not required”. How the atlas works →
The first block is for the primary paper and is the citation you should use in research work. The atlas-snapshot line only applies if you are specifically referring to this atlas’s reading of the paper on the date shown.
Primary citation
Gamer, Jackson, Van Booven, Derek, Zarnowski, Oskar, Perez, Melanie, Frank, Joshua, Pangeni, Rajendra P, et al. (2025). Stress-Induced Changes in Immune Signatures in ME/CFS Patients Determined by Transcriptome Analysis.. Methods in molecular biology (Clifton, N.J.). https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-0716-4498-0_7
BibTeX
@article{mecfsatlas-gamer-2025-stress-induced,
author = {Gamer, Jackson and Van Booven, Derek and Zarnowski, Oskar and Perez, Melanie and Frank, Joshua and Pangeni, Rajendra P and Collado, Fanny and Klimas, Nancy G and Oltra, Elisa and Nathanson, Lubov},
title = {Stress-Induced Changes in Immune Signatures in ME/CFS Patients Determined by Transcriptome Analysis.},
journal = {Methods in molecular biology (Clifton, N.J.)},
year = {2025},
doi = {10.1007/978-1-0716-4498-0_7},
note = {PubMed: 40372680},
url = {https://www.mecfsatlas.com/evidence/gamer-2025-stress-induced},
}Atlas snapshot reference
ME/CFS Atlas. Generator v1 / Scanner v1.4 / policy v0.1. Accessed 2026-05-29. https://www.mecfsatlas.com/evidence/gamer-2025-stress-induced
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