Made a Twitter summary with comments here:
https://bsky.app/profile/mecfsskeptic.bsky.social/post/3lfnfst3mev2u
1) The RECOVER study found that adults who got a SARS-CoV-2 infection were approximately 5 times as likely to develop ME/CFS.
But there are some important caveats…
2) The main one...
What the paper doesn't really discuss is that the rate of ME/CFS in the acute-infected - 73 of 4,515 (1.6%) - was much lower than in the post-acute infected - 458 of 7,270 (6.3%). The former was enrolled within 30 days of infection.
I think the main reasons are:
1) Many ME/CFS patients are not diagnosed yet. Other have received other diagnoses such as chronic Lyme, POTS, MCAS, CCI, etc that cause confusion and break up the patient community into smaller parts.
2) A lot of ME/CFS patients are disconnected from family and...
I would argue that the causal path is valuable for researchers, and an indication of what treatment to use is useful for doctors, but for patients it can simply be enough to have a description of what you're going through.
Even if the pathology or treatment for many us turns out to be very...
Thanks a lot @forestglip and @Nightsong
Will send a message to the authors asking for a clarification. Let's hope it just some minor error that they uploaded the wrong Excel sheet or used the wrong SNP identifiers or something like that. Everything else in the paper seems plausible: they cite...
Trying to understand where they extracted the data from. The paper refers to reference 8, a meta-analysis by Howard et al. 2019 of the three biggest GWAS studies on depression. The supplementary material of this study shows the 102 SNPs that reached statistical significance (P < 5 × 10-8)...
This seems like quite an important study. Hopefully, it will get some more discussion and analysis.
@Jonathan Edwards @Simon M @Chris Ponting @chillier
The major limitation is the risk of misdiagnosis but the results look so strong that they might be immune to even large rates of...
Important update from the European ME Coalition:
The results of the Horizon Europe call on high-burden, under-researched conditions have been made public. 3 (out of 4?) projects from the call have already been announced, receiving approximately 7 million each. They focus on endometriosis...
Yes, hard to see how misdiagnosis would bias the results towards no association, I would expect rather the opposite.
It also seems that the authors did not exclude many SNPs because they were associated with ME/CFS confounders, so that probably also isn't an explanation for the lack of...
I suspect it refers to lifetime diagnosis, not prevalence.
EDIT: the study it refers to writes:
The Epidemiology of Major Depressive Disorder: Results From the National Comorbidity Survey Replication (NCS-R) | Depressive Disorders | JAMA | JAMA Network
Thanks, had a look at and it mostly argues that because common and specific effects are correlated, it is incorrect to say how much % of the treatment is due to one over the other.
Even if that is true, it doesn't refute the dodo bird effect or why it has been so difficult to demonstrate that...
Anyone know recent publications on this: does the conclusion still hold?
Most papers discussing seem to be more than 10 years old. I found this one, but did not find it that good:
The Dodo Bird Verdict--controversial, inevitable and important: a commentary on 30 years of meta-analyses - PubMed
There's also a commentary on this paper by Ioannidis but is mostly shows that he doesn't get the basic things right:
https://europepmc.org/backend/ptpmcrender.fcgi?accid=PMC7137590&blobtype=pdf
He writes things like:
Thanks Trish and the S4ME Committee, much appreciated. We will think about it some more and take our time to decide. Perhaps do a poll with the 4 best options.
I'm not quite sure how your system works but regarding cherry picking it depends on how many findings it predicts, for example if there are predictions that were not confirmed or perhaps contradicted by subsequent research. I suppose you would have to publish all the predictions beforehand...
Thanks for all the useful comments and suggestions! Very much appreciate all your help.
We still prefer a short and neutral name such as ME/CFS Science or ME/CFS Insights (any thoughts on that one?). Something that briefly informs the reader that the blog will give info, analysis and updates...
We've written a blog post highlighting the most interesting ME/CFS studies of 2024:
https://mecfsskeptic.com/2024-looking-back-on-a-year-of-me-cfs-research/
Curious to know if we missed any important ones.
Twitter/Bluesky summary here:
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