Identifying causal biological mechanisms in ME/CFS by a functional genetic approach

Myalgic encephalomyelitis/chronic fatigue syndrome (ME/CFS) is a severe and debilitating chronic disease, with a prevalence of 1%, yet no cause or treatments for this disease are known. Previous studies show that part of the risk of ME/CFS is genetically determined (48-65%), but this has not been studied in detail. Therefore, the goal of this project is to elucidate the genetic background of ME/CFS to identify novel biological mechanism underlying ME/CFS. We will set up a large-scale international collaboration to identify the genetic risk factors for ME/CFS using a collaborative genome-wide association study meta-analysis.