Many of these people were in California and one of the U.S. state senators, Dianne Feinstein, has asked the scientific study. In 2008, federal health authorities began to study people say that they have suffered from this strange condition called Morgellons.
The study cost about $ 600,000. His long-awaited results, released Wednesday, concluded that Morgellons exists only in the minds of patients.
"We did not find an infectious cause," said Mark Eberhard, Centers for Disease Control and Prevention official, was part of a study group of 15 members.
The study is published in PLoS One, the Public Library of scientific journals.
Suffering from Morgellons (Mor-Gell-UNS) describe a variety of symptoms, including fatigue, injury eruption, crawling sensation on the skin, and - perhaps worst of all - mysterious red, blue or dark fibers growing from their skin. Some say they have suffered for decades, but the syndrome was not appointed until 2002, when "Morgellons" was chosen from 1674 medical paper describing similar symptoms.
Patients suffering documented their suffering on Web sites, and many of them in vain the doctor who believed them. Some doctors believe the state is a form of delusional parasitosis, a psychosis in which people believe they are infected with parasites.
In May last year, Mayo Clinic researchers published a study on 108 patients Morgellons and none of them suffers from a physical unusual. Research has shown that many of these wounds were caused by their own scratch and pick at their skin.
CDC study was designed to be larger, since a large population, and then search for cases within the group. The intention was to give scientists better understand how often have Morgellons.
They cover more than 3 million people in 13 countries in Northern California, the place chosen in part because they all had health insurance through Kaiser Permanente Northern California, which is the direction of research that could help the project. In addition, many anecdotal reports of Morgellons out of region.
Purification of a Kaiser medical records from July 2006 to June 2008, scientists discovered - and was able to achieve - 115 which is something like Morgellons. Most of them were middle-aged white women. They have not been consolidated in one place.
This led to the conclusion that Morgellons occurred about 4 of every 100,000 people registered with the Kaiser. "So it's rare," says Eberhard.
About 100 at least agree to answer the questionnaire, and 40 agreed to a battery of physical and psychological tests, which extends over several days.
Blood and urine tests and skin biopsy tested for dozens of infectious diseases, including fungi and bacteria that can cause some symptoms. The researchers found no one can explain the case.
There was no evidence of environmental causes, either, although researchers do not go into the house of every person to look around.
They took fibers from 12 people who were tested at the Institute of Pathology Armed Forces. Nothing unusual there. Cotton and nylon, the main thing - not some writhing body of the patient's body.
Skin lesions were common, but researchers have found most of them from scratch.
What stands out as the patients are in psychological tests. Although normal in many respects, they were more depressed than the general population and more obsessive about physical ailments, the study says.
However, they do not have an unusual history of mental disorders, according to their medical records. And the tests do not provide a clear indication of delusional disorder.
So what do they have? Researchers do not know. They do not even know what to call it, opting for the label "unexplained dermopathy" in their papers.
But it is clear that something is poor. "Absence of evidence is not evidence of absence," said Felicia Goldstein, professor of neurology at Emory University and author of the study.
According to her, perhaps, patients could help cognitive behavioral therapy, which can help deal with the possibility that psychological problems.
Study should not be the last word on the subject.
Among those who have additional questions was Randy Wymore, Oklahoma State University pharmacologist, who was for many years, leading scientists to look at it and concluded that Morgellons is not a mental disorder.
Wednesday, Wymore said he had not seen the paper and the CDC was unable to comment. But when the study began, he wondered whether patients with Morgellons Kaiser involved, especially if they were unhappy with the way they were previously managed by physicians Kaiser.
"There's always the question: How many participants in the study were Morgellons" he said in an e-mail.
CDC does not provide for further study, however. Examination of the agency in infectious diseases and environmental health problems and researchers have not seen any evidence of this.
"We are not experts in the field of mental health", the representative of CDC.
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