Search results

I think the two problems with the CPET findings is that 1) they are not consistent across the patients - different patients show different patterns, even if mean values for the group are different. 2) Although findings do not seem to be attributable simply to inactivity they may nevertheless...

I agree that if specific findings can be replicated in a population with tighter diagnostic ascertainment they may be a great importance. And if they can be linked to DecodeME findings in terms of genes all the better. My worry about the sample size is that the bigger your sample the more...

Why would intracranial hypotension lead to brain sagging? Unless there are actually bubbles of nitrogen collecting above the brain I cannot see any reason why it should sag. If anything it should be sucked upwards I think. I also think it pretty unlikely that brain sagging should give rise to...

Different findings in different laboratories only suggest subgroups if those findings are incompatible with each other in terms of mechanism. I am not sure I have seen any such incompatibility. And the most likely reason for different labs finding different things that are incompatible is that...

Maybe one simple way to put the point is that if a test T is found reliably to show up in a reasonable proportion of people with ME/CFS it will be a sort of 'diagnostic test' but a diagnostic test for type T ME/CFS and whether or not 95% of people with ME/CFS have it doesn't matter. Further...

Yes, but you have to factor into this the fact that human beings think they know how they are making decisions but very often get that wrong. Doctors are a prime example. There was a very nice paper in the 1980s by John Kirwan that showed that rheumatologists do not actually make decisions the...

But that's the point. We need a test that shows that 'something's wrong', not a test for ME/CFS, which is merely a placeholder term we use at the moment because we have no real idea which patients have the same thing wrong and which have some other thing wrong. Any test that tells us that...

This is a pervasive myth. I worked on rheumatoid arthritis for 35 years and we made huge progress - enough to keep almost all patients well all the time. But there is no diagnostic test for rheumatoid. GPs think there is and that is a huge problem because people with rheumatoid with negative...

That's pretty unhelpful coverage I think. Ponting's study does not claim to provide any sort of diagnostic test. Moreover, diagnostic tests are not what we need. The comment shows a lack of understanding of the basic process of clinical decision-making. The point of such studies is to give us...

Unless I am mistaken they don't even understand their own 'science'. The paper seems to be about gene expression in terms of RNA, not DNA genomic signatures, as fas as I can see. Nothing to do with DNA.

I see the project was funded by Bezos. Maybe the effects were due to the dysfunctionality of the online world?

To me the abstract is completely opaque. What diverged from what? The overall impression is that they didn't find much other than a few odd patterns with statistics I have never heard of. I prefer papers to present data rather than waffling about leveraging and rare opportunities.

Except that it is complete garbage. The first sentence is entirely incorrect. CSF does not supply the CNS with nutrients or remove waste. Blood vessels do that. The passage of 1.9 nanometer gold into peripheral nerve axoplasm tells us nothing about nutrition or waste removal in nerves (nothing...

Well, at least they give the strong impression that nobody ever believed in what they have been saying for 50 years (their first paper is dated 1977). The PACE trial never existed. Odd to pretend you never existed.

Trouble is, if I felt the way I do these days when I was forty I would be sure I had ME/CFS. But I am pretty sure it is just being over the hill and full of worn out joints, blunted nerves and wasting muscles. A diagnostic requirement of ME/CFS is that the symptoms are not explained by something...

Not in exactly the same systematic way with a group of a dozen people but yes, the process has been going full tilt in a slightly formats. The S4ME threads are often this type of conversation. Recent threads around @ME/CFS Skeptic's blogs come to mind, where everyone has picked apart ideas and...

It says scurvy can be traced back to Egypt 3800 BC (rather than 3800 years ago) which it can, by looking at the bone defects, just as we have traced forms of arthritis even in fossils millions of years old. I haven't read it all but I didn't see anything about them understanding about vitamin C...

The headline may be fair. 3800 BC may be the earliest documented case. That would be from bone damage, which is of a specific pattern in scurvy. Before 3800 BC most cultures may have been based on fresh foods and there aren't that many bones. Scurvy occurs when a diet is totally restricted to...

The bit quoted above seems fairly reasonable. There has always been a few cases of scurvy around, mostly in alcoholics and people who live in isolation with very restricted diets but it is quite likely that there are ore cases now.

If I remember rightly it appears in a scatterplot figure at bottom left suggesting low in both?