Sick and tired of being sick and tired:
a data-driven characterization of myalgic encephalomyelitis/chronic fatigue syndrome
Myalgic encephalomyelitis/chronic fatigue syndrome (ME/CFS) can be debilitating for the people suffering from it, with ~25% housebound. The disease mechanisms behind it are difficult to study in part due to the nature of fatigue: it is co-morbid with many other illnesses and thus hard to define and diagnose. One aspect universally agreed upon is the stark sex differences – with 75-85% of women among those afflicted. Additionally, the presentation of ME/CFS in males and females may differ, which needs a holistic and sex-stratified assessment to recognize these differences in the clinic. To address this gap, we aim to characterize sex differences in ME/CFS in a data-driven approach by developing an ME/CFS classification framework using phenotypic co-occurrence from biobank registry data.
School
Computer Science and Engineering
Research Area
Data mining | Machine learning | Bioinformatics | Immunology
Suitable for recognition of Work Integrated Learning (industrial training)?
No
- Research environment
- Expected outcomes
- Supervisory team
- Reference material/links
The Bioinformatics and Computational Biology Group has been a hub for bioinformatics research, teaching, and practice since its founding in 2023. We are located in the School of Computer Science and Engineering at the University of New South Wales (UNSW), Australia, and our team comprises of multiple groups who are passionate about bioinformatics and computational biology. We are involved in a number of research and bioinformatics software projects, and offer these projects for both honours and postgraduate students.
This project will identify clinical and environmental predictors of disease by evaluating phenotypic features in a sex-stratified way.
- https://emerge.org.au/
- https://solvecfs.org/about-us/
- https://cureme.lshtm.ac.uk/
- Lim, E. J. et al. Systematic review and meta-analysis of the prevalence of chronic fatigue syndrome/myalgic encephalomyelitis (CFS/ME). Journal of Translational Medicine 18, 100, (2020)
- Sandler, C. X. & Lloyd, A. R. Chronic fatigue syndrome: progress and possibilities. Medical Journal of Australia 212, 428-433, (2020).
- Bakken, I. J. et al. Two age peaks in the incidence of chronic fatigue syndrome/myalgic encephalomyelitis: a population-based registry study from Norway 2008-2012. BMC Medicine 12, 167, (2014).