Suzanne Vernon

Suzanne D. Vernon, PhD, is the Research Liaison at Bateman Horne Center of Excellence which specializes in treatment and research for ME/CFS and Fibromyalgia and the Chief Scientific Revolutionary of The BioCollective, a collaborative that provides storage and sales of microbiome samples for research and development.

From November 2007 – May 2015, Dr. Vernon was the Scientific Director of Solve ME/CFS Initiative, formerly known as CFIDS Association of America. While there she recognized that access to well-characterized clinical populations was a barrier to engaging more scientists in ME/CFS research. Thus, she started the Research Institute Without Walls (RIWW), "the first nonprofit patient-centered research initiative focused on identifying diagnostic biomarkers and disease-modifying treatment for ME/CFS." The core of RIWW is the SolveCFS BioBank & Patient Registry.

From May 1990 – October 2007, Dr. Vernon worked for the US Centers for Disease Control, first on the team investigating the human papillomavirus as an opportunistic infection in HIV-infected woman, and then in 1997, she became the CFS research group team leader, under William Reeves, MD, the Director of the CDC Chronic Fatigue Research Program. In 2005, the CDC published a case definition of CFS, commonly called the Reeves criteria, which has garnered much criticism for not being specific enough to exclude patients which other illnesses. In particular, there is no mention of post-exertional malaise. Dr. Vernon is listed as one of the ten authors.

Talks and interviews

 * 2016, Precision Medicine for ME/CFS & Fibromyalgia
 * 2015, Sleep and ME/CFS - Suzanne Vernon, PhD, A Bateman Horne Education Meeting
 * 2014, Episode 70, ME/CFS Alert - Llewellyn King Interviews Dr. Suzanne Vernon

Studies and Articles

 * 2016, Tracking post-infectious fatigue in clinic using routine Lab tests."ABSTRACT:'BACKGROUND: While biomarkers for chronic fatigue syndrome (CFS) are beginning to emerge they typically require a highly specialized clinical laboratory. We hypothesized that subsets of commonly measured laboratory markers used in combination could support the diagnosis of post-infectious CFS (PI-CFS) in adolescents following infectious mononucleosis (IM) and help determine who might develop persistence of symptoms. METHODS: Routine clinical laboratory markers were collected prospectively in 301 mono-spot positive adolescents, 4 % of whom developed CFS (n = 13). At 6, 12, and 24 months post-diagnosis with IM, 59 standard tests were performed including metabolic profiling, liver enzyme panel, hormone profiles, complete blood count (CBC), differential white blood count (WBC), salivary cortisol, and urinalysis....RESULTS: Lower ACTH levels at 6 months post-IM diagnosis were highly predictive of CFS (AUC p = 0.02). ACTH levels in CFS overlapped with healthy controls at 12 months, but again showed a trend towards a deficiency at 24 months. Conversely, estradiol levels depart significantly from normal at 12 months only to recover at 24 months (AUC p = 0.02). Finally, relative neutrophil count showed a significant departure from normal at 24 months in CFS (AUC p = 0.01). Expression of these markers evolved differently over time between groups. CONCLUSIONS: Preliminary results suggest that serial assessment of stress and sex hormones as well as the relative proportion of innate immune cells measured using standard clinical laboratory tests may support the diagnosis of PI-CFS in adolescents with IM.'"
 * 2016, Current therapeutic strategies for myalgic encephalomyelitis/chronic fatigue syndrome: results of an online survey
 * 2016, Uncovering Biomarkers– Fcg receptors in ME/CFS
 * 2015, Chronic fatigue syndrome versus systemic exertion intolerance disease
 * 2015, Comparing and contrasting consensus versus empirical domains. Abstract

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