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Interferon gamma seems relatively normal compared to controls.

Made some comments about it here:

For other outcome measures they used Tukey's post hoc HSD but for the cognitive testing they used a linear mixed-effects model where it isn't clear if they corrected for multiple comparisons.

The authors used percentage difference scores from visit 1, which often makes the analysis more sensitive to outliers (e.g. participants who had a very low score to start with, could improve by 80-100%). So it would be interesting to check if the results hold up if they used the absolute scores...

I think there is clearly no effect for fatigue or physical functioning, but the scores on the cognitive test (the DANA Brain Vital) do seem to show an improvement in the treatment group compared to controls.

I agree with these comments. There is a risk that this ruling will make things worse because it seems to overvalue the use-case of these tests. I reinforces the idea that you need to have objective abnormalities in order to be able to receive disability (which for some diseases is almost...

We've finally changed our name on social media to 'ME/CFS Science'. The main reason is that we kept getting people who were upset by our old name 'ME/CFS Skeptic', thinking that we were skeptical of ME/CFS rather than claims made about the illness. It's a bit generic but hopefully the content...

I already have a list of topics I would like to analyze and write about and not enough energy to do them all, unfortunately.

Social media summary: This brain scan study from Australia found differences between...

Question: has anyone made an overview of publicly available dataset on ME/CFS? For example a list with links to papers or repositories where the ME/CFS dataset is available and can be downloaded by anyone, perhaps classified by topics such as immunology, metabolomics ..., etc.?

I suspect it refers to the physical component score. The Sf-36 different subscales are grouped into a physical component score (PCS) and a mental component score (MCS). PCS is calculated from: Physical functioning Role limitations due to physical health Pain General health MCS is calculated...

Made this social media summary of the study: 1) Scientists from Oxford University used one of the most powerful brain scans (7 tesla MRI) and found different results for ME/CFS and Long Covid. 2) In the 24 ME/CFS patients, there were increased levels of lactate in the anterior cingulate...

Curious to read what you wrote in the letter @Jonathan Edwards

Do I understand their view correctly that Rituximab might work if applied long enough so that new plasma cells cannot be formed. If it is applied too briefly like in the phase III trial, the B-cells are targeted but the long-lived plasma cells might still be producing antibodies?

It also seems that they are p-hacking the database for all possible connections and then publish these in separate papers, which can be quite misleading.

Yes quite disappointing. This paper goes against all basic statistical principles. Hard to take the authors seriously after this.

I meant the true scientists, the people who really want to figure things out, discover truth etc, rather than academics making a career. The people who will win future Nobel prizes. I suspect that they simply ignore most of what gets published.

Seems like the sample size increased from 16 HC, 15 ME/CFS, and 15 LC to 25, 27 and 20 respectively.

It still find it weird that standards are so low in (medical) science. So how do real scientists deal with this: do they simply ignore 90% of the literature and only focus on results from labs/teams they know and trust?

The effects appear to be driven by sex and contraception use which were not properly matched between ME/CFS patients and healthy controls.