Measurement of Biomarkers in Samples Collected in a Coenzyme Q10 Treatment Trial in Gulf War Illness and Control Subjects
Abstract
As many as a third of the 700,000 US troops deployed to the Middle East during the 1990-1991 Gulf War are currently ill with a multi-symptom illness termed Gulf War Illness (GWI). Gulf War Veterans experienced environmental exposures to toxic substances including exposures to pesticides and chemical weapons. These environmental exposures have been found to cause cellular damage throughout the body affecting Gulf War Veterans and leading to a number of symptoms including fatigue, muscle pain, cognitive problems, rashes, and diarrhea. For more than 20 years, investigators have been trying to determine the cause and potential treatments of the illness or its symptoms. Unfortunately, there have been no successful clinical trials and no established treatments beyond managing individual symptoms by using behavioral aids to cope with chronic illness. Nevertheless, there have been significant advances in our understanding of GWI through strong clinical and basic science research. Previous research using an antioxidant known as Coenzyme Q10 (CoQ10) led to promising results with encouraging safety data. For this reason, the Department of Veterans Affairs (VA) GWI Research Advisory Committee encouraged the VA to sponsor a more advanced clinical trial (Phase III studies) for any treatment trials that showed positive effects on the symptoms of GWI in Gulf War Veterans. Recently, the VA awarded Dr. Nancy Klimas a Phase III treatment trial of CoQ10 to treat 200 GWI Veterans with either CoQ10 or placebo in order to determine the benefits of using CoQ10 in improving symptoms. This award funded the collection and storage (bio-banking) of samples during the trial and also to support future applications focused on finding measurable substances whose presence is indicative of some phenomenon such as disease or environmental exposure termed a biomarker. This application requests funding for the biomarker study through an invited Department of Defense application. The purpose of the current biomarker study is to find what changes or factors have been disrupted in GWI patients. Once we obtain this information, this will greatly help in the design of better future clinical trials and allow us to monitor the progress of the treatments. This project will directly help GWI patients by examining and finding a cause for their illness. A partnership project between the laboratory scientist, Mary Ann Fletcher, Ph.D., and the clinician scientist, Nancy Klimas, M.D., will be able to take basic science data and clinical health measures and build a map of symptoms and biological systems that would allow us to find a beneficial treatment. It is therefore predicted that by the end of this 3-year grant new clinical applications and benefits of CoQ10 will be available for GWI. Finally, this study will accelerate the movement of GWI research by using the ability of Dr. Fletcher and her laboratory to test and analyze complicated biological systems such as mitochondrial function and with the help of Dr. Klimas and colleagues correlate laboratory results with GWI symptoms using a computational mapping approach that examines the big picture of GWI disease state.
Document Details
- Document Type
- DoD Grant Award
- Publication Date
- Oct 29, 2018
- Source ID
- W81XWH1710683
Entities
People
- Nancy G. Klimas
Organizations
- Bruce W. Carter VA Medical Center
- United States Army