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Or that there is no neuroinflammation. Running out of inflammatory cells does not sound plausible to me. The CRH cell finding stands out as interesting. Presumably if these cells are not working other signals are maintaining ACTH and cortisol levels.

Mm. It looks as if we looked at this previously and Utsikt noted: They used Bang’s blinding index to assess blinding. I’m not very familiar with the index, but a visual inspection of the data shows what I believe is a clear skew towards guessing correctly in both groups: The effect was weak...

I can only find one PubMed entry to Zandi-M and Stevens, about using monoclonal antibodies. It would not be at all surprising if he co-authored with a psychiatrist since his main interest is autoimmune encephalitis presenting as psychosis. He expressed his dismay yesterday that there were still...

Sensitivity is often used to indicate a bad reaction even to trace amounts of e.g. nickel from a watchstrap or peanut proteins. It covers both classical allergy (peanuts) and other mechanisms (nickel sensitivity is not classical allergy but often get called allergy). Intolerance covers any bad...

I guess that there is a EULAR guideline for fibromyalgia. It is interesting that rheumatology has decided to embrace fibromyalgia and refuse to see ME/CFS.

Which it is. Mike Zandi agreed that this service is not what is needed. It used to be run by a reasonably sensible neurologist, Saul Berkowitz, but I gave a seminar to the unit a while back and it seemed rudderless. I am not sure what sort of service Saul provided but he did see people long term...

Long Covid. There seems no doubt that physicians have come to realise the reality of ME/CFS as a result of Long Covid, which, at least in shorter versions, has affected many colleagues and family members.

Yes, but none of us can understand what these guys are on about. Very impressive but completely incomprehensible. ;) I think we need a formal seminar in plain Anglo Saxon to tell us what has been discovered. Edit: Was it 42 after all?

He isn't the named grant holder as such.

For participants in the control group the instructions continued: before we continue we must inform you that during the half an hour brake a psychologist closely inspected the questionnaires you completed at your arrival and this has revealed some disturbing information concerning your...

I was just as ignorant this morning. I did not realise that the UK academic neurology centre was getting heavily into ME/CFS already.

There is a long tradition in medicine of pseudo-signs and pseudo-diseases. We have pseudo-tumours, pseudo-hermaphroditism, pseudo-cysts, pseudopregnancy, pseudohypertrophy and, most beloved of geeky students, pseudohypoparathyroidism and pseudo-pseudohypoparathyroidism. My impression is that...

You probably know as well as I do. Dr Zandi did not need any leg up. He is very well acquainted with the disease and its impact. But I am hoping he may be able to interact with the geneticists at UCL who are new to the field. One thing he talked about was attending clinics and meeting people...

No, it is a local Queen Square project as far as I know.

Worth reading Maria Leandro's initial studies from around 2005. Both short and long lived cells are involved, depending on which antibodies you look at. The LLPC almost certainly feed back and contribute to SLPC-mediated relapse too so it is a complex set up.

I met with Dr Michael Zandi, neuroimmunologist at Queen Square today in the hope of getting him interested in ME/CFS. To my surprise he already has a grant from MEA to look at potential biomarkers in ME/CFS and Long Covid and seems to be putting much of his efforts into this. We had a very...

We don't have the slightest reason to think 'placebo' effects in the broad sense are parametric. It seems extremely unlikely to me. By their very nature we know almost nothing about their quantitative characteristics. I can understand your enthusiasm but nobody with any experience of trials is...

'A growing body of research' nearly always means that there is a fashion for hoping that something reliable has been found but it hasn't yet. We cannot exclude anything but the reliable evidence at present is zero. Anyway, that post was making a different point - that 'ME/CFS' is not equated...

And rightly so. Psychopathological in fact.

But how Mr Bandura wanted to mean it is not the issue. It is how it is used. The creators of CBT may have this belief but the poster is right. CBT is designed to bias. Peter White of the PACE trial actually wrote this in a paper with Hans Knoop - that CBT works as a placebo. If the people who...