A cohort study of whether parental separation and lack of contact [...] predicts disease severity [...] in young peoples ME/CFS, 2020, O'Donnell et al

https://adc.bmj.com/content/105/Suppl_1/A188.1
PDF

 

https://twitter.com/user/status/1322548888188968960

 

I think that if sufficiently sensitive methods were applied, one would find a correlation between these kinds of things and CFS. My reasoning is that a genetic predisposition in families would cause some increase in both parental separation (due to CFS in one parent, or possibly undiagnosed mild CFS or subclinical) and later CFS in the child.

 

There really is such a thing as dumb questions. What a waste of resources.

 

why oh why are researchers sometimes so stupid?

 

Also, particularly when health is assessed according to how negatively one fills in questionnaires, I'd assume that personal/social/emotional difficulties would often correlate with health difficulties. One problem with 'fatigue' is that it could be worsened by almost any hardship in life, depending on how it's defined.

 

It wouldn't be surprising that people with adversities and sustained stress in childhood would have poorer health as adults across a number of domains. But to assess the relationship you'd actually have to measure something that it makes sense to measure.

 

This seems to be an abstract-only that is part of a conference presentation. I assume it hasn't been peer-reviewed--the journal seems to have published the conference abstracts. Does anyone see anything about funding? I assume the presentation itself has that but I see nothing in the abstract.

 

Forgive me if I missed it, but I don't recall "emotional distress" being a "recognized trigger" of ME/CFS.
Possibly, it's a reference to the next line:

That "link" has always seemed extremely dubious to me and, even if it were somehow true in some cases, it would be an antecedent, not a trigger.

 

I thought the link was supposed to be a perpetuating factor, not a triggering one. But they may be allowed to make ie up as they go on. Everyone else does.

Didn't we encounter Segal before with the Lightning Process?

 

Coyne did a good riposte of ACEs .
Sadly they are embedded in multiple spheres of life here and education is particularly affected. Some teachers even use them as predictive tools. There are few people who have gone through life without adverse childhood events of some nature, but as applied it is a very blunt tool , originally devised for educating ( social workers etc. ) , not a policy instrument .


Like most things , there is a grain of seemingly sensible ideas, then sadly it all goes to pot.

FII will no doubt follow on rapidly .

 

Couple of questions

Do they not have to cite sources when stating there is a causal link? Where is the evidence to back up this statement?

Also, is there a way to find out who funds a study like this? Do studies not have to declare funding sources or do these have to be requested by FOI?

Thanks.

 

There would be more expectation in a full published paper to cite sources but as we see often in bPS studies such as these, they often take, and get away with, a relaxed attitude to that sort of thing.

This was published in

so it might be that it only ever exists as an abstract, or that we see the full paper published at some time in the future.

Abstract only publications, from what I've seen, tend not to declare funding sources. Given that O'Donnell is employed by Children and young people’s services, UCL Hospital FT, London, UK, and McCourt and Segal are employed/based at Medical School, UCL, London, UK this might be something that they wrote up in their spare time so there might not be any direct funding.

And welcome to the forum

 

Yes, she was an author of a review of pediatric ME/CFS treatments that mentioned ONLY the Lightning Process in the abstract as being supported by the evidence. I wrote her a couple of times, but never heard back. From that experience, my opinion is that her work cannot be taken seriously. As this new piece of nonsense illustrates.

 

Right. This is not a peer-reviewed publication and although published in the journal is hasn't been reviewed or endorsed by the journal or vetted through an editorial process--assuming this is what it seems to be, which is publishing the abstracts for presentations at the conference. The slide-show presentations would almost definitely include funding if any, conflicts of interest if any, and references to key points made. But you wouldn't expect that in what is essentially the information from the fat book that conference attendees would receive about all the panels.

So in this case we only have the brief text itself by which we can assess how stupid and ill-informed this research is. Perhaps a future publication providing further information will allow us to enhance our assessment of the stupidity of the enterprise.

 

Starting point for a study?

 

I do sometimes wonder if these folk has some sort of Random Hypothesis Generator software