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ME Research UK is delighted to announce that we have awarded funding to Dr Douglas Barrett at Leicester University for new PhD-level research exploring visual problems in ME/CFS. The team includes Dr Claire Hutchinson, Dr David Souto and PhD student Anosha Altaf.
People with ME/CFS often report problems with their vision, including visual overload, difficulties filtering relevant from irrelevant visual information (selective attention), and fatigue during visual search. This PhD project led by Dr Barrett aims to look at how ME/CFS affects each of these aspects of visual function.
The researchers will conduct various tests of visual sensitivity, selective attention and target detection in ME/CFS patients and healthy control subjects, and measure related markers of behaviour, eye movement and nerve activity. As well as understanding more about the impact of ME/CFS on visual function, the results may provide diagnostic markers of the disease.
