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Blue Sky version (shorter and better): https://bsky.app/profile/simonmcg.bsky.social/post/3kdu36ufjbm2n

This is from the same team at PecisionLife that used the same approach in their ME/CFS paper last year (thread, my blog). They are using small cohorts, even allowing for the power of their combinatorial analysis. First, they defined Long Covid cases based on symptoms at 3 months (which is...

More from the MEA Added: note that both groups (biomedical engineering at Sarah University, and Cure ME) have previously found differences in the electrical properties of blood between people with ME. and healthy controls/those with MS. Presumably, this is unpublished data. They...

Can you give an example of this? I haven’t seen any good surveys by health providers

I think this is a very helpful approach, given that it aims a starting point rather than provide definitive Also, it would be interesting to see the comparison between survey results for different proposed treatments. It’s likely that the biases would be similar when the same person is...

How is that not a straightforward reason for the journal to reject the paper? Added: journal information Psych Psych is an international, peer-reviewed, open access journal on psychiatric sciences and psychology, published quarterly online by MDPI.

Chronic fatigue vs CFS and possible confusion between the two. The one potentially useful figure from this review is for the 9 studies (84.5k participants) of adults surveyed for both chronic fatigue (>6mo) and "CFS or CFS-like illnesses". (Note mostly questionnaire based of a general...

I very much like the use of disease controls in this study. Historically, the problem with the dePaul symptom questionnaire was that the questions on PEM. couldn’t distinguish between PEM. and exertion intolerance (the latter is common in many illnesses,). However, I thought the current...

Thank you, Veronica, for all the effort you put into crafting these fabulous poems. The Sestina to your mother issuch a beautiful exploration of the impact of illness on a carer as well as a patient and, even more, of your relationship with your mother, that evolved from it that it made me...

This is brilliant work. I’ve always wondered how a random data comparison would look for many different ME studies. clearly, not very good in this case.

@Andy posted some interesting data from a Lenny Jason, study about length of PEM (the dePaul symptom questionnaires questions on this are more about exertional intolerance). IIRC, the data clustered into two groups, a shorter duration of less than 14 hours, and a longer duration of more than...

It’s a good idea. I think it would be helpful to also assess comorbidities. It would also be helpful to have a minimum duration for PEM to rule stop exertional intolerance scoring. .

Further evidence clinics don't help Taking a step back, it looks to me as if these findings show that the clinic made little meaningful difference to the people they were treating. In fact, the results look similar to those for the Pace trial control group (standardised medical care) at 12...

Pretty ill, but commenting on this as I was tagged, and there seems to be some discussion about it. I completely agree that our blog is not a good source for a prevalence estimate in an official report I can’t even remember if this blog was published by Chris or myself, and I’m far too ill...

"How to unravel the complexities of virus-induced diseases, such as Long Covid and ME/CFS." This is an excellent editorial, and I wish I knew who its authors were. In a nutshell: linking viruses to long-term disease is complex, but with careful and smart research, it can be done. Two...

"biomolecular tests are finally in development" If only.

@Hubris the comparison with prison, where you also get a release date, and with needing to a wheelchair is very apt. The other one that strikes me is the impossibility of a bucket list I don't envy people with progressive/terminal diseases. But I borrowed the illnesses bucket list idea in the...

Great quotes from Ed Yong and those he interviewed. "PEM is the annihilation of possibility." Brilliant, and you could the same about ME, especially severe ME. Daria Oller, on being told she is depressed and unmotivated. She is part of a support group of 1,500 endurance athletes with long...

This is a conundrum. Response bias does not go away if subjective measures are used in unblinded trials, e.g. for pain treatments. One option might be to set a higher threshold for success, e.g. a 0.75 SD gain instead of 0.5. And it might still be worth checking that the subjective gains (even...

Origin of the phrase post-exertional malaise Interesting thanks. edited for clarity So maybe the sequence of events goes something like this 1988: The previous CFS definition, Holmes, came out (see above) and did not include the term PEM, instead using: Prolonged (24 hours or greater)...