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Mostly Swedish research. This is my understanding of the paper: Acetylcholine causes endothelial cells with muscarinic ACh-receptors that line blood vessels to produce nitric oxide, which relaxes the vascular smooth muscle and so causes vasodilation, and lowers blood pressure. Previously, it...

Sure. It's an odd framing, the focus on stopping pandemics. But, the general idea is useful. Teachers in kindergartens are often subject to an endless number of infections, let alone the children. Outbreaks of a disease in a old-age care home can be devastating. It would be helpful for...

It sounds really complicated and difficult to plan an ethical trial. And yet, people continue to be prescribed these drugs, probably often without the protections such as close monitoring that a good trial would give. And some people report benefits. Yes, maybe this is the way to start.

That's a great letter.

Good on the researchers for publishing their results. I often forget to say that unblinded studies with subjective outcomes can produce knowledge if the bias is in favour of the treatment being effective and yet there is still no reported improvement. (PACE was actually pretty much like this...

It's got all the buzzwords. But there's nothing in the abstract that makes me think this paper is any different to the dime a dozen papers waving generally in the direction of inflammation. If anyone reads the paper, maybe they can tell us if there's anything new here. (I might be being...

Thanks very much for your work and ongoing commitment to the cause @dave30th. I've donated.

That's a really good point. If women are more likely to have their reports of symptoms minimised, disregarded and straight out ignored than men are (and I think we can be pretty sure that is true), it logically means that more contact with the medical system will be required to get to a...

Re-reading this thread, it seems that a trial of Ativan in people with severe ME/CFS would be useful. There is potentially a clue here, both for the disease mechanism and for finding a treatment, even if it is just something that temporarily increases function.

They do seem to have a point here. If the WHO definition results in prevalence rates of nearly 50% at 6 months, it can't be sufficiently specific enough. I think none of us are seeing such high rates of disabling illness.

Here's an image of part of what is going on, for those of us who remember better with a picture. Sorry about the size but I think it is worth it. (I think they meant integrins, not ingretins.) This is from a 2022 paper with the interesting title of The Love-Hate Relationship Between TGF-β...

Also interesting. Ugh, there's so much to know and remember. I think I've read and written about integrins before. Activation of TGF- B1 by integrins is an important method of activation. Traction force mediated release is one important mechanism of this. One type of integrin is...

This is interesting. So potentially some methods of measuring TGF-B, maybe the methods that chop proteins up into little bits, might not accurately report the activity capacity of the protein?

They did the saliva samples at home.

Well, we know that, on average, habitual activity demands do affect cortisol levels, and quite quickly. That's not to say that every person diagnosed with ME/CFS has entirely normal cortisol levels. It's just that, when we look at the published data, there really isn't anything solid to...

On the Medline review of the journal, mentioned upthread From what I can see, the NIH operates Medline So, it sounds as though the Medline panel found problems with the Fatigue journal, perhaps deciding to not include it in Medline. And that the IACFSME is now engaging in an appeal process.

Journal club Rochelle talked about the virtual journal club, which is a very good initiative. I've been meaning to attend a session, but haven't got there yet. It is co-sponsored by Nova University (Klimas's one). The sessions are recorded and distributed to the journal club mailing list. 14...

The meeting has just finished. Below are my rough notes, I may not have everything 100% right. Fred Friedberg started the meeting, clearly setting the culture of the meeting as a top-down exercise. He talked about the energy on the board and that they wanted to convey this to us, the public...

I think the word 'somatic' should be banned. I never know what people mean when they use it, and I'm not sure these researchers did either. Yeah. I think they should have stuck to their analyses of 'does being a homemaker make you more likely to seek medical help? (apparently no); 'does being...

These researchers seem to have a weird understanding of the word 'gender'. How could female sex and feminine gender have such drastically different odds ratios? They say but in any modern society, the roles and behaviours of women and men are going to be highly overlapping for most things...