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As the authors say here: https://www.nature.com/articles/s41577-023-00904-7

That's a lot of public money being spent on things with no evidence base.

Histamine blockers are among the most commonly prescribed things for Long Covid. If they were gamechangers we'd know it by now.

So they've found that X is associated with lower Y and their conclusion is that X "reduces" Y.

Are there any other diseases where a researcher would think it was acceptable to say they've discovered the fundamental mechanism while completely ignoring one of the disease's defining features?

what's the saying: When a measure becomes a target it ceases to be a good measure?

Infantile.

I've tried to read the paper but I'm too brainfogged to make much sense of what looks like at least partially machine-translated text. (for example) "They kindly asked participants to keep a level of vigilance at the time they recognized the appearance of signs of drowsiness or light sleep such...

They refer to the same 'three Rs' there: "Patients with long COVID have called for ‘recognition, research and rehabilitation’,23 "... Reference 23 is "Long Covid: WHO calls on countries to offer patients more rehabilitation"...

Recognition is going to be increasingly important, as fewer people even know when they've had Covid in the first place, and when they go to their GP with classic Long Covid symptoms they're ever more likely to be told it's 'just stress' or 'anxiety' and have they tried yoga? The rehab I've had...

Bearing in mind that 'Long Covid' is a term being used to cover all and any sequelae of acute Covid, there are aspects of some types of LC where various types of rehab are useful - I'm thinking about respiratory issues, or certain post-hospitalisation problems - so it does make sense to have...

also along with Munira Mirza, who was director of the No. 10 policy unit at the time when Boris Johnson was scrawling 'bollocks' and 'Gulf War Syndrome' on a briefing about Long Covid.

It sounds like a garbled version of the 'hygiene hypothesis', the idea that being too clean is bad for you, but that applies to bacteria rather than viruses. https://publichealth.jhu.edu/2022/is-the-hygiene-hypothesis-true

I've done that test, lying on a sofa with a laptop! It was achievable on a day when I felt relatively with-it and didn't have any other commitments. On a PEM day I couldn't have got halfway through it.

This is so true and so important. When I first became ill, I was the full-time carer for one of my children who has a disability and needs quite a lot of support. The idea that I could put his needs second to mine to follow the clinic's suggested pacing plan was a non-starter. But every time I...

Does he genuinely think they've "shown" that on the basis of a single p.04 result from 8 patients and 6 controls? While other results in the same trial show no "effort preference" effect?

Interesting that muscles are considered to be deconditioned when that's the explanation being offered for a person's disabled state, but the same muscles are considered to be working normally when we're talking about "effort preference" and "mismatch between what someone thinks they can achieve...

Supplementary Information p. 52, discussing the cardiopulmonary exercise test: "Effort preference did not correlate with peak power in PI-ME/CFS participants (r(6)=0.13, p=0.8) which suggests that effort preference did not impact CPET performance, perhaps related to experimental incentives to...

He thinks the brain of the ME patient has assessed their muscles as less capable than they actually are (that's his "mismatch between what someone thinks they can achieve and what their bodies perform"), so it sets a lower goal at the start of the strength task than a healthily functioning brain...

From the Discussion section: "Patients with long COVID had elevated levels of IL-8, GFAP and TGFβ, with TGFβ specifically increased in the cohort with brain fog. GFAP is a robust marker of cerebrovascular damage and is elevated after repetitive head trauma, reflecting BBB disruption, as seen in...