Dear Roz,

The Gross article at the top of the thread showed a statistically significant relationship between parovoviris B19 and CRPS-1 (p< .01) in addition to the overwhelming finding with respect to CRPS-2. I'll email you a copy. I am unaware of any other studies thus far linking parovoviris B19 or for that matter any other infectious agent with CRPS, to a level of statistical significance. However, time will tell.

Thank you for posting the survey piece by Garth L. Nicolson, it was interesting. One thing I didn't understand initially was the discussion of his prior article "High frequency of systemic mycoplasmal infections in Gulf War veterans and civilians with amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS)," Nicolson GL, Berns P, Nasralla M, et al., J Clin Neurosci. 2002; 9: 525–529, where he reviews the information about how the ALS patients coming back from the Gulf War were all poisitive for mycoplasmal infections, but didn't reference a comparision with a control population. But I looked up the abstract on PubMed, and there it was:

The presence of systemic mycoplasmal infections in the blood of Gulf War veterans (n=8) and civilians (n=28) with Amyotrophic Lateral Sclerosis (ALS) and age matched controls (n=70) was investigated by detecting mycoplasma gene sequences with forensic Polymerase Chain Reaction (PCR) and back hybridization with a radiolabeled internal oligonucleotide probe. Almost all ALS patients (30/36 or approximately 83%) showed evidence of Mycoplasma species in blood samples, whereas <9% of controls had blood mycoplasmal infections (P<0.001). Using PCR ALS patients with a positive test for any mycoplasmal infection were investigated for the presence of M. fermentans, M. pneumoniae, M. hominis and M. penetrans in their blood. All Gulf War veterans with ALS were positive for M. fermentans, except one that was positive for M. genitalium. In contrast, the 22/28 civilians with detectable mycoplasmal infections had M. fermentans (13/22, 59%) as well as other Mycoplasama species in their blood, and two of the civilian ALS patients had multiple mycoplasma species (M. fermentans plus M. hominis). Of the few control patients that were positive, only two patients (2/70, 2.8%) were positive for M. fermentans (P<0.001). The results support the suggestion that infectious agents may play a role in the pathogenesis and/or progression of ALS, or alternatively ALS patients are extremely susceptible to systemic mycoplasmal infections.

PMID: 12383408 [PubMed - indexed for MEDLINE] http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/sites/entrez

Thanks again for posting this.

Mike

ps Hardly a day goes by that I don't think about Andi, but I won't get started on that now.