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Eikeland and colleagues in southern Norway There were also two decent studies that did provide some evidence for PTLDS. The first one was conducted in southern Norway and followed up on 50 patients with Lyme neuroborreliosis. [14] The results were reported as follows: “Lyme...

I’ve decided to take a closer look at the evidence for chronic Lyme disease. I’ve chosen to skip issues relating to the persistence of the bacterium Borrelia burgdorferi and the use of prolonged antibiotic therapy, to focus on basic epidemiology. The main question I wanted to answer is whether...

Yeah I might have been a bit harsh, although many of the 93,989 households that never answered their phones and did not return multiple voicemails might have heard the message on voicemail and decided to ignore it - something people who know young persons with significant fatigue might not do...

Thanks to the many people who helped answer my question but I still find it puzzling. I can understand that if you have relatively mild ME/CFS and can still try to live a normal life (like going to school or work) that many people carry on without an answer for their symptoms. But if 95% were...

I find it perplexing because I would assume that when people have ME/CFS and can no longer function, that they search for doctors, books and online resources to try to figure out what's wrong. I would think that somewhere along that quest they would stumble upon ME/CFS as a likely diagnosis...

Some notes: 1) One big, very big, problem with this study is that the researchers could only screen 5622 households of the 147,954 phone numbers they tried to contact. The authors note that "Using telephones is becoming an increasingly difficult method to recruit subjects." We can only hope...

The team of Leonard Jason have performed a prevalence study in Chicago on children and adolescents with ME/CFS. Because this was a community-based study with clinician confirmed diagnosis, this is probably one of the best studies on the prevalence of pediatric ME/CFS thus far...

Yes, that's how I understood it (see figure 2 in the paper). The blinding of patients in trials with patient-reported outcomes came closest to finding an effect with a ROR and 95% confidence interval of 0.91 (0.61 to 1.34). The confidence intervals are quite large so it's possible that future...

Will pass on the feedback. A bit of encouragement: last week #MEawarenesshour made it Top 100 Twitter Trend Charts in UK. Hope we can do better each week.

Patients made some beautiful posters to raise awareness:

It's ME awareness hour tonight at 8PM London time! Hope you can all join us this evening. I suspect many patients will like the experience because there's a feeling of brotherhood and a connection with other patients, a bit like when you go to an actual demonstration.

Not sure how this would work. If the treatment isn't effective I would still expect unblinded studies to show exaggerated effect sizes compared to blinded studies that test the same intervention because of bias. If unblinded studies that show nothing are very unlikely to get published, in...

Thanks for posting this @Esther12 The editorial and accompanying opinion are quite frustrating. I'm afraid this will give researchers a free pass when it comes to risk of bias due to lack of blinding. I suspect that in the future researchers will just have to note somewhere in their discussion...

I find this section painful to read because it suggests severely ill patients have a choice in this. The severely ill ME-patients I know were forced to do this because of their illness, so it wasn't really a healthcare decision.

I thought Bodily distress disorder was mostly intended to replace somatoform disorders (F45.0) and neurasthenia (F48.0) in ICD-10.

Congratulations @Dx Revision Watch , job well done

The paper is a bit difficult to comprehend (might have to read it again), but I also got the impression that the study showed mostly null results. The authors write:

I think its a bit premature to do these kind of animal studies. We don't know if hypocortisolism really has something to do with the pathology of ME/CFS or if its just a consequence of it and findings for TGF beta are rather conflicting. So I don't think these could be seen as indicators wether...