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So, trying to summarise what I've learned here so far. A true low reading is due to low oxygen in the blood. This is obviously important in the context of Covid lung damage. A false low readings could be due to low haemoglobin and maybe other things making red blood cells less red. It's...

Can't comment on the new version but back when I could still read books I got an older edition out of the library. Meh... Just looked up the library catalogue: 2012 edition, and 2 out of 3 copies out on loan, a fourth is held at the reading room. There's also the 2015 guide for young people...

They looked at ME patients both before and after exercise but for the controls there only seems to be one time point? Also, the numbers of dots in each figure are different. Missing data? Not very clear what sort of cohort this was. They only say: Reference 28 goes to a study about children...

Fukuda would be fine if they made sure it was Fukuda with PEM. Which I'm hoping Dr Levine would have done. But unfortunately not made clear in the paper. Can anyone explain what the significance of protein ratios is and how they relate to "biological relevance"?

I don't know enough to judge how good this hypothesis is but testing it asap and thoroughly does seem worthwhile if only because we keep getting all these small and inconclusive studies about hormones in ME. So it would be good to have a really good study on this to sort out if this remains an...

If the purpose of the public thread is as a resource for journalists would it be an idea to have several public threads, each on a different, narrow topic - in addition to more free-style members-only content - to make it easier to find relevant content? Some possible topics: experiences with...

Some sort of atypical autoimmune problems may well be going in ME, or in subgroups of ME, but calling them characteristic of ME seems to be overstating the current evidence. As far as I can make out this study starts at step 2 of the above hypothesis, i.e. it asks the question if there is...

Maureen Hanson sums up the whole sorry saga: "The BMJ article from Paul Garner shows the danger of assuming that the course of long COVID will be the same as ME/CFS. One thing that does occur in both illnesses is false attribution of the causes of recovery" [the meme in the tweet is good, too]

This really worries me. Also, a biomarker may not be widely accessible, e.g. if it requires expensive scans or the sort of tests only a few labs in rich countries can do. On the positive side, even such an impractical biomarker could still lead to a better understanding of the pathophysiology...

Yes, there's bound to be significant bias. People with fewer resources, be they financial, social or cognitive ones, simply won't get diagnosed. But I also think patients, including the charities, inadvertently feed this obsession with "high-performing". When we first fall ill we're so shocked...

Yeah, but they didn't specify what sort of pain. The fatigue and headache combo after cognitive exertion is not unknown outside of ME. Plus they didn't say how long the symptoms took to resolve. My guess is they measured soon after the exertion but impossible to tell from the abstract. Guess no...

Has anyone been able to access the full paper? PEM induced by cognitive exertion is underexplored, or should I say it's even more underexplored than PEM induced by physical exertion so research into this is welcome. Unfortunately, based on the abstract alone, it's hard to tell if they're...

How did you get on? In my experience reactions can depend on where on the body you test. I react to wool (lanolin?) if it touches my neck or wrist but I can wear woollen socks no problem. Similar with metals, some areas react worse than others. Much like @Arnie Pye I got my ears pierced and some...

Will this be translated into English? At least the bit about the different time courses should be more widely available as there's been so little research into this anywhere (section 4, starts on page 19). Very interesting reading. If anyone just wants to look at the graphs...

Was too long to read for me but it's possible to listen to it as a podcast, about 51min, which I did. Pretty good.

I borrowed one for a while. With warm hands - a rare event - my oxygen levels were always 98-100%. With cold hands - most of the time - they were below 93% or thereabouts, I don't know how low exactly because that's when the alarm buzzer went off at intolerable volume and I had to switch the...

The infuriating thing is that nobody knows. It's scandalous that nobody knows, that there hasn't been anywhere near enough research to be able to make even just an educated guess. It's not as if post-viral syndromes are rare, there's been plenty of opportunity to study them. Yet almost nobody...

Yeah, I have been wondering about that for a while. Could explain the seemingly non-viral onset cases. Presumably the old corona viruses, just like the current one, can also cause asymptomatic or very mild disease that would go unnoticed outside a pandemic. All you'd register would be that...

Have now read the paper (https://sci-hub.se/10.1016/j.jpsychores.2017.10.010). Despite being loaded with BPS authors it doesn't actually lead to tearing your hair out - if you can overlook the fact that they're studying post-exertional fatigue and that it's not clear if the participants also...

For most basic purposes a sleep tracker is overkill, I agree. But I do see a couple of uses for them if or when they become good enough to provide detailed and, most importantly, accurate data. For now they aren't up to the task so the following points are hypothetical. At the individual...