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New blog post: The dark psychosomatic history of peptic ulcer part I. Peptic ulcer was long seen as one of the prime examples of psychosomatic disease. From the 1930s to the 1980s, repressed emotions and stress were considered its main cause. "That psychic factors play a prominent role in the...

Thanks for looking into this, much appreciated.

Yes could be, I don't know the finer details of the methods but from the outset they look the same. So it could also be that their results are simply all over the place. I mostly posted it because some (e.g Ponting) seemed impressed by the large difference.

The paper states: "Using the classical case-control design, studies with sample sizes of less than 500 individuals per group could not reach the target power of at least 80% to detect realistic disease associations" But I suspect that power is still mostly determined by effect size so that the...

The results of that figure look like a major difference but the authors reported even larger differences for diabetes type 2 and covid-19 in a 2020 paper: The 2022 results on 25 ME patients and 15 controls: 2020 results of 10 healthy controls, 10 diabetes patients and 20 covid-19 patients...

I also have trouble connecting these results to their previous paper on long covid. Seems like the results are hard to compare because other measures and techniques were used. Don't think they did a TEG in the long covid paper? https://cardiab.biomedcentral.com/articles/10.1186/s12933-021-01359-7

In this sample of 25 ME patients, 12% had rheumatoid arthritis, which seems like quite a lot. Here's a related Twitter reply from one of Doug Kell the authors of the paper indicating he believes it to be present in other conditions as well:

The authors also write: "it is important to note that the fibrinaloid burden in ME/CFS seems to be less than that present in LongCovid/PASC, thus caution is required when therapy in ME/CFS."

Supplementary table 2 presents the results of the Thrombelastograph (TEG) This is what the values mean, after a brief online search: R: Time to initial clot formation K: Time from initial clot formation until reaching 20 mm in amplitude Alpha angle (α): Angle between the baseline at initial...

This quote from Andrew Gelman's blog reminded me of this whole episode with Fiona Fox and her comparison of ME activists to Nazis: "Science is kind of like . . . someone poops on the carpet when nobody’s looking, some other people smell the poop and point out the problem, but the owners of the...

Quote from the Googel Translate version @SNT Gatchaman posted: "From a health science perspective, it is worrying that the NICE Committee and former IOM are breaking with the principle that the medical basis is weighted heavier than ideology when it comes to recommendations for the...

I tend to agree with the above abstract. As an outsider, a patient, it has been disconcerting to see the poor state of health research. There are so many bad trials and studies, so much research waste. I find it quite perplexing and do not quite understand how we ended up in this situation...

Abstract Background At the 2015 REWARD/EQUATOR conference on research waste, the late Doug Altman revealed that his only regret about his 1994 BMJ paper ‘The scandal of poor medical research’ was that he used the word ‘poor’ rather than ‘bad’. But how much research is bad? And what would...

Disappointed that Dr. Khan is promoting his personal discount code for a questionable medical test. IMHO, this isn't the way forward.

Big article on ME/CFS in the influential German magazine Der Spiegel. It tells the story of Milena Hermisson a young patient and advocate with very severe ME/CFS. Her family has played an important role in the European ME Coalition (EMEC). Man kann sein Leben verlieren, ohne zu sterben...

Sounds interesting. Thanks for keeping us informed about the ME/CFS situation in eastern European countries @Wyva. Much appreciated.

I wonder if the results would change if they changed the order of the studies. Here they started with the Nagy-Szakal et al. study then used its results as a prior for the study by Che et al. And then used those results as a prior for the Naviaux et al. study. But if you reversed or changed...

Here is what the authors propose:

Looks like a very useful overview. I like that it mentions the major limitations of the current studies because a lot of the prospective studies didn't accurately measure ME/CFS or reported a prevalence rate of 20% in the control group. It has a modest conclusion and mostly signals that there...