MOST people know how depressing it is to be too tired to move or think and how difficult it is to try and keep going when you are ill.

But what if you felt like that all the time -- and everybody believed you were just putting on an act?

Leading East Lancashire physician Dr David Grimes has been examining patients with just that problem -- the little-understood illness ME -- and he's uncovered some startling patterns. AMY BINNS reports.

FATIGUE syndromes and ME are some of the most controversial illnesses around -- some doctors don't even believe they exist.

Many researchers have tried to find a physical reason for the syndrome which leaves sufferers too tired even to care for themselves and Dr David Grimes believe he may have found one -- a problem that's passed on before birth.

The medical director of Blackburn, Hyndburn and Ribble Valley NHS Trust began studying the problem himself because he was furious sufferers got so little sympathy.

He was recently asked to write a paper for East Lancashire medics about the problem, explaining his beliefs about the syndrome and the ways doctors should treat it.

He said: "Because there's no obvious disease, many people regard it as psychological, which can only be a euphemism for malingering. Their advice is that patients should somehow pull themselves together.

"Doctors don't understand and nobody else does either. Patients get very frustrated. They are blamed and get terrible feelings of guilt. It's not their fault, it's misfortune."

By surfing the net, listening to patients and reading the latest research, he believes he may have found a cause in an organism too small to be seen without a powerful electron microscope.

Known as mytochondria, they live in every muscle cell and help generate energy. Little research has been done into them, but diseased mytochondria are known to cause several very rare diseases which result in long-term muscle weakness.

Dr Grimes realised that the only drugs known to have any effect on ME are also known to stimulate these tiny organisms and believes diseased mytochondria may be causing ME.

Fatigue syndromes often begin after an infection or exposure to chemicals such as general anaesthetics, and these sufferers usually recover within three years.

But sometimes it begins in teenagers for no obvious reason and patients are less likely to recover. Dr Grimes believes these patients have inherited the disease.

Mytochondria live in human eggs but not in sperm, so -- if Dr Grimes is right -- chronic fatigue syndrome could be inherited from a patient's mother but not from the father.

He said: "Now when I meet patients I go through the family history in great detail and sometimes there are other cases on the mother's side."

Dr Grimes, who has also pioneered controversial research on the effects of sunlight on heart disease, is in the early stages of his research and is hoping to be granted funding to employ an assistant to work on the project.

With more evidence, he would be able to publish his ideas on ME in medical journals to provoke more debate on the condition, something he has already done with his research on heart disease.

He would like to be able to prove the disease has a physical cause, and is not just an imaginary illness or an excuse to get out of work.

Dr Grimes said: "We have got to try and put two and two together or we will never get to four."

One woman who is hoping he succeeds is Claire Mimnagh, an ME sufferer who first succumbed when she was 13. For months she was incapable of even sitting up in bed to eat.

Eight years later, she is capable of holding down a job as an admin assistant at Blackburn College but is still sometimes affected by the disease and vividly remembers her treatment by disbelieving doctors and teachers.

She was repeatedly told she must get up and go back to school, even when she couldn't get as far as the stairs.

Claire, of Balmoral Road, Accrington, said: "I felt very guilty that I was not at school. So many people told me it was all in my head, I actually started to believe it.

"There was nothing I could say to prove how ill I was. It was only my mum who believed in me because she saw how ill I was.

"I think people know more about it now but I still dread the reaction of people thinking it's just in my head."