In 2008, federal health officials began to study people saying they were affected by this freakish condition called Morgellons. Its long-awaited results, released Wednesday, conclude that Morgellons exists only in the patients’ minds.
“We found no infectious cause,” said Mark Eberhard, a Centers for Disease Control and Prevention official who was part of the 15-member study team. The study appears in PLoS One, one of the Public Library of Science journals.
Sufferers of Morgellons (mor-GELL-uns) describe a basket with variety of symptoms, including fatigue, erupting sores, crawling sensations on their skin and — perhaps worst of all — mysterious red, blue or black fibers that sprout from their skin. Some say they’ve suffered for decades, but the syndrome wasn’t named and given credit until 2002, when “Morgellons” was chosen from a 1674 medical paper describing similar symptoms. Some doctors believe the condition is a form of delusional parasitosis, a psychosis in which people believe they are infected with parasites.
Skin lesions were common, but researchers concluded most of them were from scratching. What stood out was how the patients did on the psychological exams. Though normal in most respects, they had more depression than the general public and were more obsessive about physical ailments, the study found.
However, they did not have an unusual history of psychiatric problems, according to their medical records. And the testing gave no clear indication of a delusional disorder. So what do they have? The researchers don’t know. They don’t even know what to call it, opting for the label “unexplained dermopathy” in their paper.
Source: Yahoo News
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