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FRIDAY, Aug. 4 (HealthDay News) -- Chronic fatigue syndrome has been accepted as a medical condition for almost 20 years. Once passed off as a series of sometimes ambiguous complaints about pain in the joints and a general malaise -- primarily by females -- the condition was confirmed by medical researchers as bona fide in 1988.
But classifying a painful physical condition as real doesn't necessarily mean that there is a specific treatment to make it better. What follows is a good example:
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The young girl had been receiving treatment for chronic fatigue syndrome for three years before anyone at the Johns Hopkins Children's Center noticed her special condition.
In evaluating the girl's condition, Dr. Peter Rowe thought he had looked at everything. Then, a lab clinician made an offhand observation that the girl also had joints that could bend and twist much more than normal.
"I was chagrined that my physical examination had not included that. So, we decided to look into it," Rowe, a professor of pediatrics, told HealthDay.
What he and other researchers found was puzzling, to say the least.
Sixty percent of the 60 children and teens they treated for chronic fatigue syndrome also had hypermobility in at least four of their joints. Only 20 percent of the general public has a single hyperflexible joint, such as being able to bend a pinkie 90 degrees backward, touch the thumb to the forearm, or bend at the waist and rest both hands flat on the ground.
"It was a surprise," Rowe said of the discovery. "Some of the kids would be able to put their leg behind their head in a seated position. Others could do the splits. Once we saw this over and over, we thought it was something that needed more study."
Their findings, which appeared in the Journal of Pediatrics, add a vexing wrinkle to the current thinking on chronic fatigue syndrome.
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