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I am not sure Younger had any data on microglial activation. My impression is that all his find gins so far are preliminary. The Japanese PET scan group found what looked like microglial activation. That needs confirming. I think it quite possible that over a period of years neural damage in ME...

The sort of thing neuropsychologists measure when they are studying perception - maybe with a tachistoscope! Effects of flash images on recall and choices maybe, but maybe something a bit different from the usual routine. We need an experimental neuropsychologist. On the basis of what I am...

(Sorry this is longish but hopefully not too confusing. A new thought.) I think this is a very sensible thing to want to study in principle. I suspect the problem is that these particular markers are not going to show anything. I do not know much about neurotransmitter metabolite levels but...

CCI is an indication enough. The indications for operating on CCI are not related to ME.

The bottom line for me is that anyone in a European or North American country who genuinely has the clinical indications for cervical fusion for CCI should get surgery funded without problems at a local neurosurgery centre. I had no trouble getting neurosurgeons to operate when needed. There is...

I think this is the puzzle with results like this. If a difference survives through to immortalised lymphoblasts in culture it seems unlikely to have anything to do with some systemic signal that arises when the illness arises. That leaves a purely genetic difference as an explanation but then...

Rest assured. This has nothing to do with physics, pretty little to do with coherent use of the English language and nothing whatever to do with science or medicine. The robot that spews out essays for you would do better.

Why didn't Graham tell us he had it all sorted? At least we may have come to the same conclusions independently!

Yes, this.

It isn't really worth asking this question because what matters to a physician is not numbness of the face but the precise distribution of the numbness and the status of 50 other neurological findings in combination. Numbness of the face is the sort of symptom that requires assessment by a...

I have thought this through a bit more. The confusion stems from a complete mishandling of the score in terms of basic number theory at the Peano level (i.e. common sense). If you want to compare X with Y then either X or Y being more than or less than Z is not what you want to know. And then...

I think Ravn makes an important point here. Around 1990 one of my academic colleagues in Rheumatology wrote a paper entitled something like 'Do Rheumatologists Do What They Think They Do?' The point of the paper was to show that the opinions given by rheumatologists about how to practice...

Objective measures will always show some correlation. Everything is correlated to everything to some extent - positively or negatively. So slow walking is correlated to hypothyroidism and to a broken leg but it is not a very good measure of hypothyroidism or broken legs (or depression).

I have to admit that I have not in the past focused on the CFscore, assuming it to be just another blunt questionnaire instrument that may show some sign of change but of doubtful merit. I am beginning to think there is not a lot of doubt about the merit. It looks to fall somewhere to the left...

It seems that to fill in the less than usual line you have to be even weller than when well.

Discussion could be: Our findings may implicate areas associated with self-referential processing in knowing that you are patient in the study rather than a control. It has certain psychological implications I suspect - which might even show on brain scans.

I tried but could not really work out what was happening.

Would it go like this? Meta-researcher to researcher: 'We are conducting a study to see how biased you are about your treatments. Would you be happy to give consent to be involved?' Researcher: 'Oh, sure, ask away.' Meta-researcher: 'Are you biased in any way towards your treatments by...

I think there may have been a confusion when the score was invented. For arthritis we have scores of change and scores of current absolute state. The relationship between the ways they used is quite complex. I suspect with this one they had not thought out which they were wanting.

Another weird thing is that if there is a feature a particular person never gets - say sleepiness - then they cannot score 0 for that, only ever 1. The more I look at this it seems to have been created by someone with no understanding of simple arithmetic.