A nanoelectronics-blood-based diagnostic biomarker for ME/CFS (2019) Esfandyarpour, Davis et al

That reads like garbled nonsense.

 

Yes, it would be good to check against MDD & anxiety as well, because we don't know whether this is an as-yet-unknown effect of emotional distress on cells.

ETA just to clarify - i dont think ME is in any way a result of 'emotional distress', i'm just saying that it needs ruling out in the same way that deconditioning does, as a reason for the test result... if we are ever going to squash the BPS juggernaut

 

Looks like the statistician already said what I said, much better than how I said it. Oops.

In a CFS research context, the sample blinding was even more critical. You need a group with

• the technical expertise to replicate this study
• the actual equipment to complete it
• another research entity with any desire to do so.

If you add the blinded samples, and/or sedentary controls, diseased controls, or even actual controls (they were not matched) it creates a better indicia for other groups to replicate.

That is the last I will critique though. OMF only has a budget of like 2 million dollars.

 

I think that maybe more has been added to the "expert" responses on the SMC website. Went to the web archive link, and got a message that the content was being downloaded - I've never had that happen before, though must admit I don't visit the web archive much unless it's links from here, so maybe I'm wrong. Prof Kevin McConway's response seems rather longer than that quoted in early posts in this thread. But here's the bit I wanted to quote:

(my bolding above)

Prof Kevin McConway: “I am a trustee of the Science Media Centre, but I am writing these comments in my capacity as a professional statistician.”

 

One wonders where this rigour was when the SMC bigged up the Lightning Process.

 

All very valid points. But i do hope he will apply them in exactly the same way to the next BPS study that the SMC want to promote - MAGENTA perhaps. If this type of rigour had been applied to PACE et al we wouldnt be in the mess we are now in would we. So yes I'm glad he is pointing out these things but he'd better point them out in an unbiased way to every study he reviews rather than only the biomedical ones..

ETA lol @adambeyoncelowe ... we cross posted & you said it in a much more succinct manner I needent have bothered

 

It shows why we need this test .

 

yes, I was just thinking the same about the interferon alpha research (only involvement of ME/CFS patients was as controls, not sure if they were matched up there either).

From what I read somewhere(it might have been on one of his videos, interview with Ben(?)), I think Ron Davis was putting this 'out there' as a carrot for funding; there might be other applications for the technology and if they can get the money to fund it then it should secure more regular financing (hopefully from the NIH).

 

Over the years, the likes of SW and PW have been quick to respond to biomedical research with justified cautions of correlation against causation, the dangers inherent in small preliminary studies and other perfectly valid things that cannot be argued against. However they do not apply these standards to their own research which have all these problems in spades.

Means that it is not ignorance driving their awful research methodologies but deliberate manipulation.

I wonder if the newspaper hype is actually being run by the SMC so that they can get their attacks in quickly.

 

Perhaps a literature review would indicate the nature of the papers to which such, perfectly proper, rigour is shown.

 

This is the key issue, particularly given the frequent claim that this shows ME/CFS is not "all in the mind" (I really dislike that phrase because it denigrates mental health problems).


Depression probably has a stronger immune signal than ME/CFS. Michael VanElzakker has pointed out that you get stronger signal of microglial activation in the brain for depression than for this illness.


So it is very important to show that there isn't a comparable signal from the Nanoneedle set up in illnesses such as depression and anxiety.

 

Not sure if this comes from here, a message I've just received:

(edited)

"URL:
https://www.nbcnews.com/health/heal...r-possible-blood-test-chronic-fatigue-n999766

Ref: https://www.pnas.org/content/early/2019/04/24/1901274116

Scientists say they're closer to possible blood test for chronic fatigue
----------------------------------------------------------
Simon Wessely, chair of psychiatry at King's College London's Institute of Psychiatry Psychology & Neuroscience, who has worked with CFS patients for many years, said the study was the latest of many attempts to find a biomarker for CFS, but had not been able to solve two key issues: 'The (first) issue is, can any biomarker distinguish CFSpatients from those with other fatiguing illnesses? And second, is it measuring the cause, and not the consequence, of illness?' he said in an emailed comment. 'This study does not provide any evidence that either has finally been achieved.'

Andrew Lloyd, an infectious disease doctor professor at the School of Medical Sciences, University of New South Wales, Sydney, Australia said that it's premature to make broad conclusions about the study results.

'It is very premature to suggest this may represent a 'diagnostic biomarker for ME/CFS' as the sample size of patients was only 20 patients (and 20 healthy control subjects). This is very small for validation of a new diagnostic test,' Lloyd said.

Wessely also noted that doctors and patients should not be disillusioned by the study's results. 'You don't need a blood test to prove that an illness exists, and nor does the absence of such a test mean that it is 'all in the mind'."

 

@Ben H - it looks as though several of us are wondering why there were no control patients from other disease groups (e.g. MS, depression). I'm not able to read much at the moment but is it the case that the controls used were just healthy people, not deconditioned ones? If so, why were there no deconditioned controls?

My impression is that participation is easy from a subject's point of view (you just donate a bit of blood) and from the researcher's (you just stick the blood on the nanoneedle). So the research seems easy and cheap. Surely there are biobank blood samples for disease controls, at least, that would be easy to access?

As a patient I'd love to think that this is the 'holy grail' test for us but without comparison to deconditioned healthies and to other disease groups, the findings are far weaker than they might have been if what seems like easy steps had been taken.

So do you know why those steps weren't taken? Am I underestimating the difficulty of using such additional control groups? I'd really like to know. Are you able to feed that question back to Dr Davis?

Sorry if this has already been answered somewhere - as I said, I'm having trouble reading much.

 

most interesting may be indeed the "psychology" behind this odd publication.

surely, they wouldnt do anything that sheds a bad light on "stanford".

 

Absolutely not. It would still be a biomarker. Wessely has put a foot wrong there.

 

Not really because I cannot work out the geometric relation between probe and a cell? several cells? - how do we know what the impedance is being measured across?

I would also like to see the raw renormalised impedances to see how variable they were.

 

Agree 100%. Indeed, I'd go further and say if this disease was one day to be shown by faulty brain wiring or whatever I wouldn't necessarily have a problem with that: but even if that were to be true it would remain the case that CBT and GET are ineffective, as are denial of medical tests and welfare/benefits (an approach I believe has been attributed to a certain scientist who's been popping up in the media to downplay this paper).

In my view, the biggest harm to ME/CFS patients hasn't been the suggestion this is a mental illness - though that remains entirely unproven. The biggest harm to patients has been that this is an illness that can be cured easily by the patient thinking his or herself better, that the patient can effectively 'snap out of it' and should ignore what their bodies are telling them, that failure to improve is the fault of the patient, and that any complaints around the efficacy of this treatment approach are a symptom of the patient's delusion rather than an indication of the treatment being entirely ineffective.

 

Perhaps I should take John up on that. The quote sounds like twaddle to me.

Diabetes is a syndrome rather than a disease and a blood sugar test is quite good. A rheumatoid factor test picks out people with swollen joints and it took fifty years to work out why the two are linked - after the diagnostic test had become standard worldwide.

 

Actually, I see @Ben H isn't often on the forum - @JaimeS, is this something you can help with, please, in terms of passing on a message?