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'Shedding a bit of light on the subject' Dr John Allen |
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Dr John Allen, Principal Clinical Scientist, Regional Medical Physics Department, Freeman Hospital, Newcastle upon Tyne Following on from the excellent ME North East Medical Research for CFS/ME Conference in September I thought I would offer a short article about some of the optical diagnostic technologies being developed in the North East to help assess patients with CFS/ME. I am a clinical scientist and manage a microvascular measurement service at Freeman Hospital, and mainly for patients referred to the Newcastle upon Tyne Hospitals NHS Foundation Trust. I employ light of many different colours across the visible spectrum, and also beyond, to investigate the smallest blood vessels in the body, for example the capillaries close to the skin surface. My service is currently run on a part-time basis, but will expand from the summer of 2008 with its transfer to a new state-of-the-art facility at the hospital. There should be considerable scope for introducing many new exciting microvascular technologies here, ultimately offering additional diagnostic information and assessing responses to therapy. Importantly, there is also collaboration and support from several leading clinicians, including Dr Julia Newton and Dr Gavin Spickett. A key focus of my work is to develop and validate new optical technologies ready for routine clinical measurement use. In the last 12 months our team has been looking at optical pulse assessment of the postural vasomotor reflexes – using award winning multi-site technology to understand how the tiny blood vessels in the skin of the legs behave (or don’t behave) when you stand up. This work, supported by the CFS/ME Northern Clinical Network, will be completed by early 2008 - we are hopeful that this could lead to a new diagnostic test in CFS/ME. We are also seeking basic funding to enable us to study how the tissue glows in the dark - that is how the skin “fluoresces”. This approach can give objective information about composition, potentially valuable since specific tissue fluorophores have recently been linked to chronic fatigue. The new measurement facility will also house a unique thermal physiology laboratory, enabling techniques such as dynamic thermal imaging to be employed to assess thermoregulation in a range of different patient groups. This includes those with CFS/ME as they can sometimes have significant sensitivity to heat and/or cold. There are many other potential opportunities but I will end by saying the future can be bright and many other colours besides orange.
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