THURSDAY, Sept. 13 (HealthDay News) -- A father's concern for his son led to research that now sheds new light on a disease that has long been shrouded in mystery.

Andrew Chia, now 24, was diagnosed with debilitating chronic fatigue syndrome in 1997.

This week he is co-author with his father, Dr. John Chia, of a study which links chronic fatigue syndrome (CFS) with enteroviruses, which cause acute respiratory and gastrointestinal infections.

"This is sort of a new beginning. Now we can have development of antiviral drugs," said the elder Chia, an infectious disease specialist in private practice in Torrance, Calif. "We don't have anything for these poor people, although we've tried a number of things. Now we can study how these viruses behave and how we can kill them."

"Dr. Chia's data was on a substantial number of patients," said Dr. Nancy Klimas, a professor of medicine at the University of Miami Miller School of Medicine and director of the Gulf War Illness Center at the VA Medical Center. "This could send the field in a new direction."

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Chia started on a Herculean task of drawing some 3,000 blood samples from patients, looking for viral genes. Over a period of five to six years, he found evidence of enteroviruses in 35 percent of patients, but this was after multiple samples from each patient. "If we were to take one sample from each patient, it would be less than 5 percent," Chia said. "We realized this wasn't the way to look at it. The assumption we made about CFS that we have to find the virus in their blood is totally wrong, so we started looking for the viruses in tissue, meat."

A team of European investigators had found enteroviruses in the brain, muscle and heart of a CFS patient who had committed suicide. But brain and heart biopsies are virtually impossible to perform in living people.

Chia started looking in the viruses' "area of replication," meaning the stomach. The viruses are resistant to stomach acids.

They eventually took stomach biopsies and performed endoscopies on 165 CFS patients, all of whom had had longstanding gastrointestinal complaints (these are common in CFS patients).

Eighty-two percent of the specimens from CFS patients tested positive for enteroviral particles, compared with just 20 percent of the samples from healthy people. In many patients, the initial infection had taken place years earlier (up to 20 years).

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