wow, thanks for sharing!

That's a pretty neat discovery.

Thank you for sharing this. I have often wondered about research in this area. Not exactly as high profile as breast cancer or heart disease. It's good to know that progress is happening.

A good academic resource for tracking advancements in CVID research is the following Google Scholar search, which will find most articles related to our illness published since 2011:

http://scholar.google.ca/scholar?as_vis=1&q=common+variable+cvid&hl=en&as_sdt=1,5&as_ylo=2011

(Hopefully, that link works; this forum software is known to eat up hyperlinks and blissfully ignore them.)

Most of the papers listed above require access (generally, through university subscriptions) to the various medical journals. If you find something interesting, I can usually get you a copy of the paper.

Most articles, as you can tell by looking above, are related to:

- diagnosis,
- effectiveness of and reactions to treatment ("case studies"),
- certain (very rare) genetic markers that may be tied to CVID

Unfortunately, key papers which may lead to novel forms of treatment are very rare, indeed.


I think that the biggest issue that we, as sufferers, face is several-fold:

(1) our illness is (for the most part) very effectively treated via IgG

(2) it's genetic, not virus-borne (i.e., no one else is at risk of getting it from us)

(3) it takes a long time for people to die from this illness (on the order of 20-25 years, usually from complications related to lung failure)

(4) it's quite rare

Not to sound all pessimistic, but as a result of the reasons listed above, CVID will not receive the same kind of urgency or funding that gets allocated to other types of medical problems. As a result, I don't see our problem being cured within our lifetimes.