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3. Platelets: slightly off at baseline, normal after exercise Platelets are plate-shaped cells whose primary role is to plug blood vessels that are punctured to promote clot formation. The authors looked at the impact of exercise on the expression of individual genes (their main method), and...

2. The big story: gene expression indicates "primed" monocytes in ME Monocytes are large immune cells, and their role is to migrate to where they are needed and become macrophages. Macrophages engulf and neutralise invading pathogens like bacteria, viruses and even yeast. They can also Hoover...

Comments 1. Overview This is a small sample of only 30 patients (I'm pretty sure they took blood samples from 90 people with ME). Two findings stand out: for monocytes and platelets At baseline, they found big differences between patients and controls for monocytes. (They found smaller...

So, we are now up to 333,000 people reporting their daily activities have been “limited a lot“. It wasn’t so long ago this was around 230,000. Approximately 600,000 people have had long Covid for between one and two years, and half a million have had it for two years or more. What would be...

Welcome to the firm, Veronica, it’s great to have you here. Congratulations on making the “best of the Net“.

I had assumed that amber was a reference to the colour of a country on fire.

This tells us no such thing. They looked at 1,789 shared proteins and, quite rightly, corrected for the huge number of comparisons. That makes it very hard to find statistically significant differences and with n=15 they could only hope to find enormous differences. Not statistically...

Thanks, @Tom Kindlon, for being willing to put yourself out there. I'm sorry the illness has had such an impact on your life. I think the world has missed out on you, as well as the other way around.

I’m not familiar with the authors, but this looks like a very impressive study. I don’t know how much evidence there is for their hypothesis beyond “well, that would explain a lot”. It’s worth spelling out what they’ve done well t (and haven’t even done the study yet): – published a protocol...

ADDED I wasn't at the meeting, but a lot of this reads like a general commentary on genetics research from the author, not reporting/a summary of the genetic section of the symposium (for instance, I'd be surprised if any of the speakers spent much time on the 2007 Kerr study). "It is important...

it's a good point, but I don't think so. In fact, some of the ME patients also reported an MS diagnosis. I asked the researchers if this could explain the findings. They went away and checked the numbers and said no because there were few cases. Added: Also, in diagnostic accuracy studies of...

It's a concern. The authors point to two issues that might be behind the lack of replication. 1. For technical reasons (that they will address in future studies), they weren't able to run a full replication and are likely to have missed true positives. 2. The cohorts were less than ideal, coming...

Link with Long Covid & MS - work underway I didn't include this in my blog because of my concerns about the accuracy of gene identification I mention above, but I still find it very interesting. Using a hypothesis-free combinatorial analytics approach based on the PrecisionLife platform, we...

Thanks, it's a very interesting idea, but you may have overestimated by PowerPoint skills. What the paper doesn't show is the link between subgroups and genes. Or even clear description of subgroups e.g. (hypothetically) infectious onset in teens, POTS, more severe - because there is limited...

I've now published a blog, thread https://www.s4me.info/threads/blog-new-study-links-14-genes-to-me-cfs.29511/#post-437195 Thanks for the feedback on the graphics I posted. It was clear I need to make some changes to keep everything clear, I'm afraid I ran out of energy. I might add them later.

New Study Links 14 Genes to ME/CFS A study has analysed existing genetic data in a new way to link 14 genes to ME/CFS and identify many patient subgroups. If the new approach pans out, it could transform ME research and turbocharge the development of treatments. Paper: Genetic Risk Factors for...

Hi, I'm looking for some help with my blog. Assuming everyone on this thread is aware that in this study Precision Life uses combinations of SNP's (between three and five), which it calls disease signatures. Then it searches for all the patients with the same disease signature (actually, it...

PrecisionLife would argue that this could be due to subgroups. The largest subgroup they identify covers 31% of patients. Let's say this is an autoimmune subgroup: if only 30% of those treated with rituximab had an autoimmune disease (and assuming rituximab was the right autoimmune drug), it...

I'm aiming to get a blog out later in the week and I'm talking to 1 of the researchers this morning. It's onw of the most complex papers I've ever read, so it might take me a while. Briefly, this approach, by a techbio company, uses a novel analytical method on existing genetic data (from the...

This is now sold out - will videos of the sessions be made available in due course?