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I think, at the moment, the one by Rosmalen and her Lifelines cohort is one of the best, unfortunately. Persistence of somatic symptoms after COVID-19 in the Netherlands: an observational cohort study - The Lancet Still haven't seen a good epidemiological study that tested for ME/CFS following...

Sounds interesting. Anyone knows how to get the full version of the paper?

Among individual pathogens, infection with Borrelia burgdorferi (the bacteria that causes Lyme Disease) seems to have resulted in the highest incidence rate (11.77).

Someone kindly shared the paper with me and it seems that the MetaBlind study was included. I'm not fully sure how the treatment effect for blinding patients and outcome assessors became so large as many previous meta-epidemiological studies found uncertain results, but I expect it was because...

Thanks for tagging @cassava7 I don't have access to the text but this looks like a summary of both the meta-epidemiological studies and the within-trial comparisons that have been done thus far. Both have serious weaknesses. The meta-epidemiological studies compare trials that might have a...

Rather inappropriate of him to use the opposition to the ME/CFS guidance to make his case against NICE because it was about something completely different. Seems like he lacked good examples and thus fitted this one in.

Looks like a good report indeed. As cassava says, it calls for awareness campaigns on post-infectious syndromes, education in medical schools, more funding for research. It clearly states that post-infectious syndromes are not somatoform, that all illnesses have psychological components, that...

The paper states: "This study was funded through an anonymous donor via the McMaster University Trust." I wonder if this donation was solely intended for this study or line of research. If so, it is a bit curious that this donor donated to McMaster University to perform an ME/CFS study, given...

Yes I think that it is what happened: they recorded the data on PEM to assess the Fukuda criteria but I'm not sure what exact question they used. Based on the supplementary material it might have simply been: "do you have an increase of symptoms following exertion?"

In the supplementary materials they give an overview of their assessment. Lack of blinding + subjective outcome measures did not lead to high risk of bias rating. The studies that received a high risk of bias rating did so because they had missing outcome data.

This is from memory, but I think the 2003 paper only clarified some ambiguities in the Fukuda criteria and recommended some questionnaires to use. The thresholds were defined later, so reference to this 2003 study does not mean the empirical definition, I think. The supplementary material...

All of the 8 included studies were from the same research team (the Dutch research team of Knoop/Belijenberg). The review states: "All studies were from our own research group. No additional RCTs from other researchers fulfilling our eligibility criteria were found." So this is pretty much a...

Rather strange that the paper writes: "Ethical approval was waived for this study because it is not a research study." Also: some of the authors are from MiZ Company Limited, 'a pioneer in research on medical of hydrogen'.

Some quotes from the article: "ME/CFS participants faced a lack of clinical care, information, advice, and practical health on how to look after their own health. This made them feel abandoned and left to care for themselves, coping with a disabling condition. This, in turn, led several...

If I understand correctly, they identified 199 SNP in the ME/CFS study of which 24 where also associated with long COVID in the Severe cohort and 27 in the Fatigue Cohort (and 12 in both the severe and fatigue cohort).

The description of the treatment is so vague, it is hard to know what exactly it entailed. I wish it was common standard to include the treatment manual or a link to it. It must exist as the paper writes: "The therapists received an intervention manual describing the sessions"

The authors write: "For patients with moderate PSS, psychosomatic therapy seems to be effective compared with patients with severe PSS. This is in agreement with a previous study with an individual, nurse-led CBT-based intervention for patients with PSS [28] that was particularly suitable for...

Seems like another null result that is spinned into something positive. The authors write: "Overall we found statistically significant effects of our intervention, but effect sizes were small (d = 0.22 for RAND-36 PCS, d = 0.33 for role functioning/physical, and d = 0.23 for bodily pain), and...

Published in the Journal of Psychosomatic Research Abstract Objective: To examine the effectiveness of a cognitive behavioural intervention delivered by mental health nurse practitioners (MHNPs) to patients with undifferentiated somatoform disorder (USD), compared to usual care. Methods: We...

I don't interpret it as that the participants weren't properly informed ('lack of clarity about what the trial was aiming to do') or that they think patients were too stupid to understand the materials. It feels more like a criticism that patients weren't willing enough to go along with the...