Researchers at the University of New South Wales studied the blood of 64 sick people, including 22 who went on to develop chronic fatigue. They found no difference in the levels of cytokines — proteins the immune system unleashes when there’s an infection — suggesting while the proteins may trigger chronic fatigue, they’re not responsible for ongoing symptoms, they said.

“I was very much wedded to this idea that cytokines would have to be important,” said Ute Vollmer-Conna, who led the research at the university’s school of psychiatry. “We feel that we’ve eliminated some possibilities and you’re getting therefore a little bit closer to what might be the case” with chronic fatigue, she said in a telephone interview today.

The findings help narrow the focus of research on a syndrome for which there is no known cause and no effective treatment. Chronic fatigue costs US$9.1 billion a year in lost productivity in the U.S., according to a 2004 study by researchers at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

Vollmer-Conna and her colleagues now think the body’s immune response to a virus may send signals to the brain that prompt it to enter a hyper-vigilant state, similar to post- traumatic syndrome, which causes prolonged fatigue. Their findings are published in this month’s edition of the journal Clinical Infectious Diseases.

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