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MHC has been looked at and the results are not clear cut. Fluge and Mella reported an association in that region to HLA-DQ and HLA-C I think. HLA-C would fit.

The simplest way to test it would probably be finding all the people with ME who by chance have been treated with Campath-1H or something similar. An ablative dose, as might be used for treatment of leukaemia etc. should solve the problem. GWAS might reveal MHC gene associations but it would...

Maybe our species should have been called Homo apopheniensis

Why are so many of these junk papers published by Elsevier I wonder? This reads exactly like one of those computer fakes. Dial in rheumatoid arthritis and metal sensitivity and ask for a computer-generated paper. The introduction is exactly what you should get - full of evidence, as required...

Therefore, by definition, because the patient-centered interview defines the specific BPS model in each patient, the model itself is evidence-based. This means we now can, for the first time, identify a scientific BPS model for every individual patient. Er no, there was a guy called Sigmund...

CD8 T cells would be likely to be involved because they are involved in antibody-independent immune responses. CD4 T cells might very likely also be implicated but in the disease examples we have, such as psoriasis and ask spend, nobody really knows which cells are the primary problem. T cell...

The problem with muscle biopsy is that to get a sample that is big enough to be representative it is likely to be painful and to leave a scar. In fact to be representative you might need to have about six samples taken. It is a useful technique for picking up marked structural changes as in...

Difficult to know what it would mean for it to be accurate or inaccurate since nobody knows and nobody agrees. I very much doubt that most people diagnosed with fibromyalgia have any neuropathy. A high proportion of doctors who use the term use it mean that they don't think there is much wrong.

The whole article looks to be misleading make-believe to me. It just throws in a mass of conflicting pseudo facts without any indication, until maybe the end, that a lot of doctors don't really see what FM is supposed to mean.

I think it is unfortunate that a study of six month follow-up of people hospitalised for Covid-19 gets tweeted back as a 'Long Covid' study. The 22% of continued lung function impairment is more or less by definition not usefully put under Long Covid. It is scarring or lung tissue loss...

Yes, I wiped down the groceries with meths just this minute. I don't think there is any cut off time for safety because virus will die off exponentially. I think 72 hours is a pretty reasonable time to go by but we are now again tending to wipe everything down unless it is going to be boiled or...

I was reading the coverage in Science at the link that says Scienmag. If the author is quoted saying these things I would be pretty sceptical. I have not kept up with what people are doing with stem cells recently but when I did this sort of thing was pretty much always pseudoscience. The main...

The write-up is full of hype and bullshit (like the continuing reference to a cytokine storm that isn't there and guff about autoimmunity). I am also unclear how cells from an umbilical cord can be used without immediate graft rejection. But I am always ready to be proved wrong.

Good work.

Pentoxifylline has been around since about 1980 and has always had a reputation for being a drug that does a little bit of everything and a lot of nothing. It has been handed out in desperations to millions of people over the years. If it had any major role in something like ME someone would...

There are always risks of harm in trials. Part of the point of a trial is to make sure there is no harm. Prior to PACE there was no clear evidence of harm as far as I am aware. We still do not have reliable evidence of harm. What we have is a strong suggestion that there may be harm and that is...

I am not sure we know that exercise is beneficial either for back pain or fibromyalgia. The best study I have seen in back pain suggests that the best thing is to let the patient decide what to do (a Dutch study). Wide categories certainly run the risk of producing results that miss...

They would have been able to legitimately claim that the treatment worked for at least some - that's all. And of course if they had monitored deterioration properly that would have come to light and the distinction would have been made. If they had done the trial properly and interpreted it...

And it seems so far even more difficult to draw a line under their outpourings.

No, I said that was exactly the wrong thing to do. It doesn't work like that. As Michiel says, it dilutes and risks missing a result, but it can be a very good strategy. I used it myself for studying inflammatory arthritis of the knee. It is routinely used for simple painkillers - where...