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It's like AI software had a go at writing about Long Covid - some things right, some things wrong, some conjecture presented as fact, an uncritical reflection of 'what people are saying'. I guess it is hard to write about Long Covid well because so many things are still vague. I see that the...

As much as I'd love mestinon to be an answer, and as much as I want Systrom to keep investigating, and as much as I think a problem related to acetylcholine is plausible, the result isn't overwhelming. The sample size is small: 37 in the treatment group, 16 in the control group The effects are...

https://community.cochrane.org/organizational-info/people/central-executive-team/evidence-production-methods-directorate/stakeholder-engagement-high-profile-reviews-pilot-1 This paragraph suggests that you are right @Peter Trewhitt, that the ME/CFS rep positions do represent organisations, and...

We have had it confirmed that Hilda remains part of the IAG. I agree we shouldn't speculate, but I also think the full list should be in the public domain. It was made clear that people were appointed as individuals, and not representatives of any organisations they were associated with...

It's a bit like having a trial of gay conversion therapy and saying 'Due to our selection procedure we may have included patients who did not always expect a conversion therapy approach'. Quite apart from whether such a trial would be ethical, it is clearly wrong for mentally competent people to...

Is the full list of IAG members in the public domain? I know we got information about the initial appointments, but there were at least a couple of appointments later.

If patients were included who did not expect a psychosomatic approach then it seems to me that the principles of Free Prior Informed Consent were not followed. This is because the treatment is fundamentally a psychosomatic therapy (the authors acknowledge that in the title), with all the...

Worth noting the patients with later variants were seen earlier (median 4 months). That might have affected severity ratings and recovery rates. Also, most of the patients were infected during the 'wild-type' period (556/804).

Post COVID Clinic at Aarhus University Hospital (AUH) There are a lot of typos that make this paper rather difficult to read. e.g. (Ref 9 says "The available data suggest that the infection with the Omicron variant results in fewer long-COVID symptoms compared to previous variants" and...

The reported persisting symptoms seem quite odd - the percentages reporting each were mostly much lower than I'm used to seeing in Long Covid cohorts. 49.7% reported fatigue; 33.1% reported breathlessness; 20.1% reported joint pain. 41% reported 'anxiety and depression'; loss of taste and smell...

The control cohort is also post-infection. The PCC cohort here has fewer people over 65 (18%) than the control cohort (25%). Also 59% female versus only 46% female in the control cohort Still a high hospitalisation rate compared to the controls (58% versus 34%), although it is claimed that 55%...

Indeed. That statement is coming from a woman who invented a scale asking people whether a symptom now is worse or better than what it was when they were well. If it really is impossible to know whether sleep problems pre-dated infection, then it is also impossible to know, simply by asking...

I guess there are lots of reasons. It's increasingly hard to see the same GP when making appointments - practices tend to be larger with a big roster of doctors and an even bigger number of patients. Without that continuity of care, it's easier for doctors to dehumanise their patients...

Perhaps here is another Freudian slip, from the 'Added value of this study' summary: Rather than 'comprising', this study 'compromises' both patients and GPs 'Compromising' definitions: (of information or a situation) revealing an embarrassing or incriminating secret about someone. e.g...

Oh, the irony. The labelling of many people with 'health anxiety' is surely partly the result of doctors feeling uncomfortable with a situation where they can't otherwise identify a cause of the patient's symptoms. Feeling that they must know everything and always get things right, 'health...

The mismatch on BMI could definitely be an issue: The complement system is dysfunctional in metabolic disease: Evidences in plasma and adipose tissue from obese and insulin resistant subjects, 2019, Moreno-Navarette et al For example the Factor D finding could have been affected by the...

Figure 5 is a correlogram. 5a is for all of the substances tested, for the controls, and 5b is for the cases. (I don't understand why these two correlograms weren't combined - what is the point of duplicating the same data above and below the diagonal line? I mean, you could put the case data...

Yes, good sample size, healthy controls had also had Covid-19. Figure 1 - Dot plots for the 6 complement activation products, plasma concentrations. Overlaps, but some great P values. Long covid on the left. They investigated levels of complement components and regulators too, and again...

This sounds interesting. It's too late in the day for me to read it today, but I look forward to hearing more e.g. sample size, how the individual complement proteins compared, whether any of the findings have also been found in ME/CFS.

I'm not sure that it does prove that harm to patients is intended. I think many health professionals involved in this truly believe that they are helping these inadequate people with their low self-efficacy to become better versions of themselves and recover. The fact that providing this...