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1) Important news: there is now a much greater chance than ever before for #MECFS scientists to obtain funding from #HorizonEurope. 2) For the #HorizonEurope call Tackling high-burden for patients and under-researched medical conditions (HORIZON-HLTH-2025-01-DISEASE-07) the Commission has...

This paper comments on this: Reference 21 is: Pooling/bootstrap-based GWAS (pbGWAS) identifies new loci modifying the age of onset in PSEN1 p.Glu280Ala Alzheimer's disease - PubMed Abstract The literature on GWAS (genome-wide association studies) data suggests that very large sample sizes...

Thanks. I suspect this inflates their effect size. Not sure why they didn't simply use cohen's d as the data is quite similar to a normal distribution.

Also note that this study used a submaximal test in contras to previous CPET-studies which I think all used a maximal test.

In table 4 of the paper, they report an effect size for Work rate at the first ventilatory threshold of 0.742. I don't see how it can be that large. I got an estimate of cohen d = 0.44 when using the sd of the difference between CPETs and d = 0.34 when using the poolsed sd of CPET1.

Thanks for the suggestion. The best I got was 57 matches out of 68 using height, age and weight (sex has a lot of NA's in dataset 1 for some reason). Some might be errors in data insertion. For example there's only 1 participant with height 175 cm and weight 74 kg in both datasets but in...

Tried to make some plots with dotted lines showing the trajectory of participants: I don't think that the participants who had a workload of 0 were excluded (there was one at CPET1 and 5 at CPET2).

The raw data that they posted includes two datasets (separate sheets in Excel) but I don't see how these can be linked. Both have 68 rows, so I assumed this were from the same participants and we could just bind the columns. But the sex columns from both sheets do not match suggesting that...

Another issue is the a higher number of missing values. Was looking at VO2 at VT1. 29 out of 68 (43%) of participants had missing data at either CPET1 or CPET 2.

Thanks for the explanation! So it's possible that a critique in Matters Arising - Nature Comms, is still in the pipeline? Perhaps somebody could write to the editors at Nature Comms to ask about this? If it got rejected after peer review, it would be interested to know what the critique said...

Despite all the talk about PEM/PESE, it seems that they did not measure this symptom (in contrast to many other Long Covid symptoms)?

Sounds interesting.

Bit unfortunate though that the commentary was not published in the original journal and that Walitt et al. were not urged to respond to it. I thought this was the original plan: is it possible to give some background on what happened? Did the journal reject it?

Overall, the differences between the two groups do not look very large.

Discussed here: https://www.s4me.info/threads/use-of-eefrt-in-the-nih-study-deep-phenotyping-of-pi-me-cfs-2024-walitt-et-al.37463/post-519299

Great work, thanks to all authors!

The intervention also consists of only 2 sessions. I wonder if people who truly believe in mind-body recovery programs are frustrated by papers like this or is it really anything goes...

There are millions of people in chronic pain while shootings like the one by Mangione almost never happen. So I don't think there is a strong connection here.

The effect sizes they report in the abstract (around half a standard deviation for fatigue) are inflated by including the Qiqong trials. For short-term fatigue, for example, the PACE trial found an effect closer to 0.2 instead of 0.5 SD. The same for other outcomes.

They included 4 Chinese trials of Qigong exercise and 1 of isometric yoga. Also included are the GETSET trial (Clark 2017), the PACE trial (White 2011), a very small (n = 14) Australian trial comparing two types of exercise (Sandler 2011), and the Spanish trial by Nunez et al that combined GET...