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If it was an online survey it is easily explained by ascertainment bias, which is likely to be major for questions of this sort. There is also the issue that he is presumably asking about people who have continued to be unwell following Covid for a period of months. My experience of both my...

Another odd thing is that now there is so much talk of MCAS - which is supposedly NOT allergy but mast cell activation for other reasons.

Can someone who knows statistics explain how you get an odds ration of 70 with n=15 per group? If none of the controls had ICP8 then the ratio should be infinity? If one did it should be no more than 15?

But that has not happened. Rather than trashing ME it is at the front of the consensus name, at least in all international research circles, and also in the UK health care system. We now have a situation where the term ME/CFS is widely preferred and the combination is an explicit...

Indeed, but Ms Johnson still hasn't, even now. The point I am trying to make is that however much it may be true that the US medical research system was incompetent and probably negligent in its dealing with ME/CFS, Hilary Johnson's analysis is more likely to drag things back to the naive...

The article makes a number of useful points but as others have said I am not sure that having no diagnostic test has much to do with the problem of adequate care for ME, or much to do with it being unexplained either. Parkinson's has no diagnostic test but is explained by loss of dopaminergic...

The existence of MCAS seems pretty dubious to me and any relation to symptoms like Long Covid even more dubious. That looks like gossip science to me. Mast cells are everywhere so being in brain or near this cel or that tells us nothing. They are near all cells. I am afraid that most of this...

That looks like a weak study with a major ascertainment problem risk. The threshold for diagnosing atopy is likely to be pretty vague and diagnosis rates far from complete for all cases in population records.

So where is the causation to go with these off beat correlations? The idea that acute pain transforms into chronic pain is drivel as far as I know. A decent hip replacement takes away pain even if it was there for ten years. Chronic back pain occurs because discs wear out in almost everyone...

Well actually I rather think Dr Costa has tried to follow it up and presumably didn't find anything much.

I would be interested to know where the atopy bit comes from. I looked up atopy and as I expected found this: Asthma, allergic rhinitis, and atopic dermatitis are almost invariably accompanied by elevated levels of IgE. If that is true someone should have found elevated levels of IgE...

It seems to me entirely right to move attention from occasional outbreaks of nobody knows what, to ME/CFS as a not uncommon disorder that seems much the same whether or not it starts with any sort of infection. That has been very much borne out. If he was trying to disappear CFIDS then bravo -...

In a review in 1991 Peterson dates the outbreaks that led to the CFS term from 1984 so maybe Strain has just misremembered the date of the christening.

I don't see that. It seems quite cogent. It may miss the point that within idiopathic fatiguing illness there may be several usefully separable groups, one with PEM that we know think of as distinct enough to be a syndrome. But his concern was almost certainly to do deny something very different...

I find it hard to take this seriously. Why would a piece like this have 14 authors scattered across the globe if they were not all chums of the people at the biotech startup in Milan (Techitra)? When you see people justifying a drug using words like 'dysfunction' and then giving 173 different...

She says this on camera in 'Unrest'. The problem is that the assays used have proved to be unreproducible. And it is not clear that they would mean much if they were reproducible. It is a pity that Klimas was still claiming gross abnormalities in 2015 despite this.

Yes but we can all be aware of those. The issue is supposed to be misinterpretation of interoceptive signals contributing to illness. How can a therapist know there is misinterpretation and how could they possibly know how to tell people how to change that misinterpretation? There is a naive...

Dear @lunarainbows. I don't think anything I have said is incorrect or inaccurate, although it may not be expressed in such a way to cover the full complexity of the situation. I have tried to point out in several posts that the situation is going to be very complicated. Nobody doubts that...

To a one time inflammation scientist that looks like complete nonsense to be honest. The author is not very good at English either. edit: I see that she is a great expert in fact - a first year part-time Phd student! And she works for Carmine Pariente at King's.

That seems to me pretty reasonable, and consistent with what I had suggested, even if I think on balance it is either badly worded or wrong. He was arguing against a 'discrete form of fatiguing illness' and in the sense that I understood the term ME I think at that time I have sympathy. ME was...