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I’ve only read the abstract, but it’s conclusion that vigourous physical activity has a modestly protective effect of reducing the risk of major currently heart disease is not exactly earth-shattering. And no other measures of physical activity had an effect. CFS did not have a significant...

To come back to the paper itself, I think what it shows that Is valuable is a kind of biological footprint of the illness – even if you can only see it in a large sample. Although the pre-print says it shows it’s not a psychological illness, I don’t think that will convince doubters without...

Thanks, Veronica, you write so beautifully and evocatively about the experience of ME. And it’s great to have your work out there for others to read and maybe understand a little better

Norwegian Patient Registry studies Bakken: 74% female, ratio 3.2:1, 5,810 G93.3 cases, hospital diagnosis Hilland: 79% female, ratio 3.7:1, 5,560 G93.3 cases, hospital diagnosis These two studies used the same methodology, with Hilland looking at data several years later than Bakken. Both used...

NHS Hospital Episode Statistics Samms & Ponting preprint (thread) 80% Female/3.9:1, 100,000 cases diagnosed with the G93.3 code. This is the biggest study for sex ratios using codes that do not include chronic fatigue. Data quality/diagnosis The dataset reaches back to 1989, but outpatient...

Probably not needed for most people here, but here's a lay summary I wrote for te MEA website. Research: Myalgic Encephalomyelitis is clear to see in the blood

Thanks to @Hutan for splitting off this thread on sex ratios/female predominance. I was going to focus on the other big studies, but wanted to make a few points in response to yours above. I'm glad we agree that the prevalence data (and implied incidence) looks wrong. The question is whether...

These three researchers Have done great work including their recent pan- European patient survey of Oval 11,000 people. Apart from looking at experiences of treatments and getting social care, they also showed The adolescence and midlife age peaks found in the earlier Norwegian study Replicated...

I've reread that paper. It's interesting and has some notable ME authors: Lucinda Bateman, Charles Lapp and Peter Rowe. However, there are issues with the data that cast doubt on the accuracy of diagnosis and so the finding of 59% female (sex ratio 1.4) for ME codes as shown in Table 8. The...

I've just got around to posting about Veronica's Hamlet poem on Twitter. It's good to see it got some traction there:

Bakken: this is the lowest of studies I trust. DecodeME is likely better as bigger and broader recruitment (doesn't need GP referral) at 83% female (Mail in rate sample return was VERY high, reducing bias risk.) Japan/S Korea prevalence. As before, prevalence studies tend to have small samples...

Copied post Bakken: this is the lowest of studies I trust. DecodeME is likely better as bigger and broader recruitment (doesn't need GP referral) at 83% female (Mail in rate sample return was VERY high, reducing bias risk.) Japan/S Korea prevalence. As before, prevalence studies tend to have...

The severity data comes from DecodeME. (Sex ratio has been discussed elsewhere. I would be very interested to see any good papers showing a significantly lower sex ratio - the best would be from community studies, and they are based on tiny numbers of cases and the error margins on M and F...

I'm no expert either, and I hope Chris Ponting will reply later. But my take is slightly different to yours. Of course, big samples mean it’s easier to reach the statistical significance. And it would be extremely surprising to discover large effect sizes, given that there are no replicated...

It's great to see new people getting involved in ME - this is exactly what the field needs, and hopefully there will be more new faces - and more from those just starting to publish in ME. Chris Ponting has got new people intersted.

I think it’s very important as perhaps the final nail in the coffin of the deconditioning hypothesis. Inactivity accounted for very little of the differences between people with CFS/ ME and healthy controls. Without having comparable data for psychological illnesses such as depression, it’s...

Thanks for pointing that out. :) It's what they explicitly state and published in the main biggest GET papers is the basis for GET (and the graded exercise approach of FINE). As you say, who knows what they believe. And those statements are a problem for any future attempts to justify GET...

The Pace authors can't do that: they nailed their colours to the deconditioning-causes-symptoms mast. Likewise Fine trial authors. And thanks for the info about the history. I believe the big Edwards big-effect GET trial came directly from the Liverpool pain management approach. Miller is...

Helpfully, the Pace trial spells out the central role of deconditioning in their theory of why GET works. It seems pretty clear that if deconditioning doesn't cause the problems, there is nothing to treat, whatever the method. This is from Panel 1 of the Lancet paper (PDF): Graded exercise...

I’ve spent nearly a year in total living alongside people who must be even more deconditioned than I am because of severe physical difficulties due to eg MS. And yet their illness is nothing like ME, they have better stamina/less fatigability (despite most needing bed rest during the day) and...