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  1. ME/CFS Skeptic

    Physical function and psychosocial outcomes after a 6-month self-paced aquatic exercise program for individuals with [ME/CFS], 2025, Broadbent+

    The 6 minute walking distance seem to have increased with 53.8 meters in the intervention group and 19.2 meters in the control group. So the difference is around 35 meters, which is around the minimal important difference and similar to what recent Long Covid exercise trials found, for example...
  2. ME/CFS Skeptic

    Identifying commonalities and differences between EHR representations of PASC and ME/CFS in the RECOVER EHR cohort, 2025, Powers et al

    Data came from the National COVID Cohort Collaborative (N3C), a collection of EHR data from 83 health partners representing 21.7 million patients. But there were only 5781 cases in this dataset. That's like a prevalence of 0.027% which seems very low. In comparison, the R53.82 group...
  3. ME/CFS Skeptic

    Identifying commonalities and differences between EHR representations of PASC and ME/CFS in the RECOVER EHR cohort, 2025, Powers et al

    The ME/CFS cases do not seem to have increased much or am I reading the figures incorrectly? The rest of the paper focuses mostly on their machine learning algorithm that tries to model ME/CFS and compare it to Long Covid.
  4. ME/CFS Skeptic

    Identifying commonalities and differences between EHR representations of PASC and ME/CFS in the RECOVER EHR cohort, 2025, Powers et al

    ME/CFS was defined like this: Figure shows the number of ME/CFS and Long Covid cases over time in the health records:
  5. ME/CFS Skeptic

    Brain Retraining treatment for ME/CFS and Long COVID - discussion thread

    It seems that the people who sell and promote these brain retraining courses rarely hold a medical degree or have a scientific background. Phil Parker (lightning process) – osteopath Miguel Bautista (CFS recovery) – personal trainer Raelan Agle (Brain Retraining 101) - social work degree Ashok...
  6. ME/CFS Skeptic

    Brain Retraining treatment for ME/CFS and Long COVID - discussion thread

    I think I know which one you mean: 'ME/CFS & Long Covid Recovery, Support, & Inspiration'. It does include a lot of people enthusiastic about these brain retraining programs. The moderators however, seem to have conflict of interest for selling courses for these programs and often do not have...
  7. ME/CFS Skeptic

    Placebo effect discussion thread

    What is the reasoning or argument behind this? Why should we not be surprised?
  8. ME/CFS Skeptic

    Preprint Resistance Exercise Therapy for Long COVID: a Randomized, Controlled Trial 2025 Berry et al.

    The also claim significant effects for hand grip and quality of life but they tested so many variables (including VO2 peak and fatigue severity, which showed no effect) and did not control for multiple testing. The trial design was also A versus A + B, with the control group receiving no...
  9. ME/CFS Skeptic

    Preprint Resistance Exercise Therapy for Long COVID: a Randomized, Controlled Trial 2025 Berry et al.

    MCID estimates are a bit imprecise and vague, so not arguing that one is necessarily better than the other. But it seemed that they changed their MCID choice after seeing the data, without explaining this in their paper. The correct way would probably to argue that their result may or may not...
  10. ME/CFS Skeptic

    Preprint Resistance Exercise Therapy for Long COVID: a Randomized, Controlled Trial 2025 Berry et al.

    Similar to a previous exercise study found an effect of 36.4 meter on the primary outcome the incremental shuttle walk test. They argue that "The effect size exceeded the minimum clinically important difference of 35.0 m [13]" But in the power calculation in their protocol, they used a minimal...
  11. ME/CFS Skeptic

    Preprint Resistance Exercise Therapy for Long COVID: a Randomized, Controlled Trial 2025 Berry et al.

    Abstract Long COVID, reflected by persistent symptoms, including breathlessness and fatigue, after coronavirus disease-19 (COVID-19) infection, presents an unmet therapeutic need. In this study, the effects of a resistance exercise intervention on exercise capacity and health status in...
  12. ME/CFS Skeptic

    Multiple Voxel Pattern Analysis Shows Associations Between Chronic Fatigue Syndrome and Cortical Atrophy, 2025, Wu et al

    Here's the data on the cortical thickness of the brain areas they tested in both groups:
  13. ME/CFS Skeptic

    A Thought Experiment on Muscles

    This is just personal anecdote, but in my experiences there is something that goes wrong in the muscle. It feels like the lactic acid feeling you get after a long run but from doing simple tasks (that take a while). I got this early on in my illness when I wasn't deconditioned yet and still...
  14. ME/CFS Skeptic

    Persistent symptoms and clinical findings in adults with post-acute sequelae of COVID-19/post-COVID-19 syndrome in the second year....[], 2025, Peter

    Which is much lower than the 50% that some advocates use (often based on the flawed review linked below): https://www.s4me.info/threads/the-persistence-of-me-cfs-after-sars-cov-2-infection-a-systematic-review-and-meta-analysis-2024-dehlia-et-al.40426/#post-556430
  15. ME/CFS Skeptic

    Review Effectiveness and tolerance of exercise interventions for long COVID: a systematic review of randomised controlled trials, 2025, McDowell et al

    Looked at some of these studies like Li 2022 or Romanet 2023 and they focused on patients discharged from hospital with pulmonary problems so quite different from the ME/CFS subtype of Long Covid.
  16. ME/CFS Skeptic

    Review Effectiveness and tolerance of exercise interventions for long COVID: a systematic review of randomised controlled trials, 2025, McDowell et al

    Don't quite understand what you mean by this? Isn't the problem simply that these trials did not include a non-exercise control group (and thus cannot estimate the effect of exercise)?
  17. ME/CFS Skeptic

    Cognitive Impairments in Two Samples of Individuals with ME/CFS and Long COVID: A Comparative Analysis, 2025, Sirotiak et al.

    Cognitive symptoms are one of the required symptoms in many ME/CFS case definitions, so this seems like a circular argument.
  18. ME/CFS Skeptic

    2025: The 2019/24 Cochrane Larun review Exercise Therapy for CFS - including IAG, campaign, petition, comments and articles

    There is a new comment by Lillebeth Larun, the primary author: https://www.cochranelibrary.com/cdsr/doi/10.1002/14651858.CD003200.pub9/detailed-comment/en?messageId=451624933
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