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Just saw their documentary about AlphaFold which figured out how human proteins are folded in 3D and earned them a Nobel prize in 2024. Impressive work, can only hope that AlphaGenome will have the same impact. The documentary is called 'The Thinking Game' and worth a watch:

This looks interesting. Perhaps it could help to interpret the findings of DecodeME and clear out some ambiguity about which genes are involved? From what I can understand it looks like a incremental improvement over previous models rather than a big breakthrough. Part of this is likely because...

Was thinking that if the treatment really worked it would probably also skew the results in the intervention group, with more people correctly identifying they were getting the treatment and not the inactive control. This wouldn't explain why 40% in the sham group strongly believed they were...

We have a thread about this trial. It seems that blinding wasn't fully preserved and patients could somewhat guess if they were in the intervention or sham control group. Vagus nerve-mediated neuroimmune modulation for rheumatoid arthritis: a pivotal randomized controlled trial 2025 Tesser et...

Posted about this on social media and Prof. Ponting responded: Not for #MEcfs but for rheumatoid arthritis: Successful clinical trial of vagus nerve-mediated neuroimmune modulation: https://www.nature.com/articles/s41591-025-04114-7 Question asked by Eric Topol and Kevin Tracey is: Can this...

Counterpoint: I assume it was only cut at the stomach or abdomen, so it wouldn't disrupt the vagal nerve's function of picking up inflammation or damage signals elsewhere in the body and passing it on to the brain? ME/CFS might most often be caused by local inflammation of the vagal nerve at...

I suspect this is another aspect that might significantly hamper advocacy: if patients get a different, related diagnosis to ME/CFS. I saw this in Belgium where the ME/CFS community got torn apart when one popular doctor started diagnosing patients as having Chronic Lyme. In French speaking...

Don't want to go into political discussion but I suspect that that individualistic anglo-saxon mindset created a poor welfare system overall, not just for ME/CFS but for all disabilities. And because of this, ME/CFS patients have it particularly though in these countries, despite there being...

I think that in the UK the problem was that some patient organisations sided with BPS researchers and this created internal division. In the US, there were ME/CFS advocacy calls where activists yelled at scientists. Although Solve has the same professional and lobbying mindset, I think that...

My guess is that it mainly started with Scheibenbogen diagnosing patients with ME/CFS without any psychobabble. This created a group of patients who likely felt less shame or stigma from this diagnosis and were willing to advocate for it. I see the many press articles and demonstrations as a...

Yet the UK and US have always been the countries that have done the most in recognising and studying ME/CFS so don't think this cultural aspect is an important factor in research and recognition of ME/CFS. The Netherlands very much follows this individualist and anglo-saxon mindset and does more...

Think these are the results relevant to ME/CFS (taken from Supplementary Table 3 - sheet B AII UKB PheWAS results). Human readable phenotype Raw phenotype beta se p nCases dataset Root broad.root refined 41202#G933#Postviral fatigue syndrome 41202#G933#G93.3 Postviral fatigue syndrome...

Thanks for spelling this out. So in ME/CFS one key area to study might be how neurons are activated intracellularly by cytokines that signal viral infection and induce (certain types of) sickness behavior. Then we would have to compare those pathways in ME/CFS and controls. Suspect this would...

Perhaps the virus infection and immune irritation of the vagus nerve is gone in ME/CFS but the viral signalling fails to shut itself off due to some defect in this pathway?

There was this 2023 study with autopsies of 27 people with COVID-19. The authors claim to have found signs of inflammation at the vagus nerve. Axonal mRNA analysis showed upregulation of interferon signalling but no signs of axonal damage. Sars-Cov-2 RNA correlated with these signs of...

Thanks. Would a local cytokine response somewhere around the vagus nerve be visible on scans, like the whole body PET scans by Michelle James.

What about the hypothesis that ME/CFS might be due to overactivation of the vagus nerve, might that be a good soluiton to the problem issue of massive sickness behavior without clear pathology or immune response?

I think the data from ME/CFS patients is also from the Keller study so that only the Long Covid results are new. There were quite a lot of tricky things about the Keller dataset (such as outliers influencing the results) so I wonder how they handled this here. I don't fully understand their...

From the paper (my bolding)

ZNFX1 is located on chromosome 20, where DecodeME found the strongest signal. It's near ARFGEF2, CSE1L and STAU1. It has been associated to general traits such as height, bone density and electrocardiogram morphology (amplitude at temporal datapoints), but not with other diseases yet...