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It was fine for me - it's a zip folder which downloaded to my slow computer in a couple of seconds. Then the source file for 3A is all of 131lKB. I'm uploading the latter, which contains the full data for the Effort task, to this message. For each participant you get 40-odd rows (=#of trials...

Is it possible to work backwards from the dataset to figure it out? (Source data for figure 3A seems to have everything, right?) Completely beyond me, but your and others' effort preferences might be more favourable than mine.;)

This one sounds convincing, as the healthy controls for the CFS group were matched for age and gender. But then I remember that in the PACE trial, the King's centre's patients do not sound representative of the wider patient population. Eg, in the PACE Trial Management Group meeting 16...

Yes, I can see how that would happen. Once the panel comes back negative they lose interest completely, and really just want to explain it away. And with malaria or hepatitis C, presumably the ANA decreases again at some point, rather than staying up indefinitely? I'm fine with the...

Thank you for this. I think 3 doctors have given me the infection explanation, and it’s given as an explanation on sites explaining causes of positive ANA, eg: So that must be based on some data. I understand your point about the possibility of some people that currently come under the...

Yes, and we don't know that the patients were able to do the same amount of hard tasks as the HVs, because they didn't do them!

Could we talk about the anti-nuclear antibody result? As someone already posted upthread, they found that 5% of HVs had a positive ANA compared to 24% of pwME. This was not significant in their small sample (p=0.09), but as @Jonathan Edwards commented, this could be a type 2 statistical...

Just to be clear, I have been reporting what I think Nath thinks. Not what I think! I have no desire for years of a trial of therapies that have no prospect of working, and that could have nasty consequences. I appreciated your explanations that rituximab was unlikely to help in ME -...

Yep. My understanding is that Nath is going on indirect evidence - perhaps some of these findings: in order to conclude Alternatively, perhaps he's thinking of trials of neuro drugs: I get the sense that as far as Nath is concerned, they didn't find the smoking gun, but they did find...

Exactly. The word "preference" denotes volition. So if you're describing something in someone's brain that they have no control over, which is certainly Nath's interpretation of what they're describing, don't use the word preference. The use of "unfavorable preference" made it even worse...

I find the way Nath and others explain effort preference in interviews much more palatable than how it is written in the paper.

Yep, I know what you mean. But in interviews about the paper, Avindra Nath is talking about exactly that - a trial of multiple treatments with one placebo arm, that would simultaneously try to replicate some findings in larger cohorts and test a bunch of drugs - I have the impression he is...

Gotcha. That seems like an important difference, potentially, between these tiny cohorts. I had a look at the diet data yesterday in supplementary data 11. We have diet records for 10 HVs and 11 pwME, and diet history questionnaires for 15 HVs and 17 pwME, so there's just too little to go...

BMI was no different between the two cohorts according to supplementary data 5: mean (SD) BMI of HVs: 25.8 (3.4) ME/CFS: 25.9 (5.3) p-value 0.9 Was there a subset for this DOPA finding with higher mean BMI?

Agreed. And it was an anchor we saw coming given what Walitt has published about all fatigue being somatoform, but boy, when it lands on your head, it's even heavier. Exactly. Daft little games are not somewhere we can squander energy, even if we think we're well able for them. I agree. I...

Me too, repetitive movements are awful, and this was evident in the repeated grip tests in this study where the patients' force declined rapidly. I would have started with easy and then alternated between easy and hard not because they were easy and hard but because one would give my index...

Further re Walitt and cancer-related fatigue: In the 2015 chemo-brain paper http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4750385/, Wang, Walitt et al 2015 cite just two studies on chronic fatigue syndrome; one is Holmes’ paper, the other is one by Ocon. The Holmes et al one is the 1988 paper...

I agree. I think you will see this if Walitt does a study of cancer-related fatigue. From Wang & Walitt's 2015 chemo-brain paper:

For me, the fundamental problem with the “Effort Choice” task, and the interpretation of the easy task/hard task ratio in this paper, is that you could have predicted the outcome before the study. The groups do not come into this task on an equal footing. Normal volunteers come in with...

Oh you don't need to convince me of that!