U.S. to study bizarre medical condition

Staff and agencies
18 January, 2008

By MIKE STOBBE, AP Medical Writer Wed Jan 16, 11:04 PM ET

ATLANTA - It sounds like a freakish ailment from a horror movie: Sores erupt on your skin, mysterious threads pop out of them, and you feel like tiny bugs are crawling all over you. Some experts believe it‘s a psychiatric phenomenon, yet hundreds of people say it‘s a true physical condition. It‘s called Morgellons, and now the government is about to begin its first medical study of it.

The study will be done in northern California, the source of many of the reports of Morgellons (pronounced mor-GELL-uns). Researchers will begin screening for patients immediately, CDC officials said Wednesday. A Kaiser official expects about 150 to 500 study participants.

Some doctors believe the condition is a form of delusional parasitosis, a psychosis in which people believe they are infected with parasites.

Pearson suggested the study will help determine if Morgellons is the same as delusional parasitosis or something new.

CDC officials acknowledged the study is limited and the results won‘t give a complete picture of the problem.

Some of these patients who are Kaiser Permanente members have said they don‘t like the way they‘ve been treated by Kaiser doctors and probably won‘t participate, said Wymore, who formerly was a research director for a patient group and hears constantly from Morgellons patients.

A Kaiser official said he had not heard such complaints. No patient will be excluded from participation, even if a doctor previously determined the problem was psychological, said Dr. Joe Selby, director of research for Kaiser Permanente Northern California.

Any fibers or specks that are collected will be analyzed at the Armed Forces Institute of Pathology, Selby said. Doctors who believe the condition is psychiatric suspect fibers are likely just threads from clothing.

Some say they‘ve suffered for decades, but the syndrome did not get a name until 2002, when "Morgellons" was chosen from a 1674 medical paper describing similar symptoms.