Statistics Seminar: DNA methylation as a marker of disease diagnosis and aging of patients with Myalgic Encephalomyelitis/Chronic Fatigue Syndrome

Speaker: Nuno Sepulveda (Institute of Medical Immunology, Charité)

Title: DNA methylation as a marker of disease diagnosis and aging of patients with Myalgic Encephalomyelitis/Chronic Fatigue Syndrome

Summary: 

Myalgic Encephalomyelitis/Chronic Fatigue Syndrome is a debilitating disease with unknown cause characterized by persistent unexplained fatigue and post-exertional malaise among other symptoms including unrefreshing sleep, poor memory, and frequent infections. Interestingly, patients often report a severe microbial infection at the onset of their symptoms. Until now there is no disease specific biomarker for the respective diagnosis. Instead, patients are diagnosed by a symptom’s assessment questionnaire in which the prior diagnosis of known pathologies is used as exclusionary criterion. In the quest of unravelling the underlying pathological mechanisms of the disease, several epigenetic-wide association studies were conducted using high-throughput DNA methylation data. In this talk, I will review this type of data and its statistical analysis in the context of a biomarker discovery. In addition, I will review how methylation data can be used to ascertain putative premature effects on aging of patients suffering from this disease.