Association of adverse childhood experiences with the development of multiple sclerosis, 2022, Eid et al

As defined by this study. Regardless, I agree this is far more significant in itself than whatever causative rabbit they are fetching out of this hat.

 

I'll scream this until my throat is a lump of bloody raw meat, but I am 100% certain this is the real placebo/nocebo effect: imprecision from non-measurement. Everything else is either unaccounted for or an artifact like a random correlation. Once clinical psychology stops messing out as if fuzzy maths accounted for large compounding imprecision, all this silliness will go down as an embarrassment worse than even phrenology was.

Substituting a temperature scale for a subjective rating equivalent (e.g. cold, warm, hot) would yield similar manipulation of outcomes. When there is no right answer, there is no wrong answer either. Especially since more psychometric questionnaires use weird and ambiguous questions, no doubt on purpose as this is one way to manifest the -cebo. Asking simple, direct questions would not yield that.

 

I haven't read the abstract, or comments, and my blood sugar may be a bit low from a (too) long delayed meal but this statement is stunning: "
Association of adverse childhood experiences with the development of multiple sclerosis, 2022, Eid et al"

What idiot would write this/publish it, oh it was published in the BMJ. Any of these folks reflected on the fact that a recent study identified EBV as a cause of MS?
Reminds me of the local guy who phoned up the official in his pigeon club to tell him that his pigeon had just arrived back in the loft - winning the race. Quite an achievement since the birds weren't released on time owing to bad weather in France. He resigned and I think was sued by those who had purchased "winning" birds --- no such ignominy awaits these guys --- probably some award or other for "valuable" research!

Someone should have a go at BMJ - surely this deserves to be challenged.

 

Sadly I am not surprised by the level of abuse found having spent my psychiatric career dealing with the outcomes. There are many modifying factors (for instance - genetics, age, severity, social support, early intervention etc) to why an individual who has experienced abuse (of any form) will go on to have a psychological effects. The literature is still emerging around brain inflammation and permanent damage to neural pathways and networks which then may require psychiatric input.

In Norway the level of childhood abuse and neglect in an adolescent sample found in 2019 can be read here.
https://www.nkvts.no/english/report...-norwegian-adolescents-12-to-16-years-of-age/

In NZ, (which has a higher rate of child abuse than Norway, https://www.oecd.org/els/soc/SF3_4_Family_violence_Jan2013.pdf)
A recent cross-sectional study has shown an increased rate of family violence due to the pandemic. https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0241658

 

No. There is a lot of different lines of research going on into trauma and it’s mental health effects especially in the area of depression, psychosis and PTSD, all have methodological problems and major limitations.

If interested here is review article of the current findings on a small area of this research. https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S2666354622000084

 

To a one time inflammation scientist that looks like complete nonsense to be honest.
The author is not very good at English either.

edit: I see that she is a great expert in fact - a first year part-time Phd student!
And she works for Carmine Pariente at King's.

 

It also suggests that the editors and peer reviewers aren't doing their job properly.

 

Yes, lots of psychiatrists, psychologists, government policy makers, the wellness industry and lots of the public here are are pretty sold on this, I am not. Many psychiatrists, especially in the private sector are getting very excited and claiming a variety of psychotropics can treat the “inflammation of trauma” mainly via histaminergic effects etc and neuroplasticity etc, not convinced.

 

Another too late meal - poor organisation skills!

I remain entirely baffled --- EBV is strongly linked to MS (large study of US army personnel) and presumably if a sufficiently large population were available, who had post (EBV) viral onset, then pre-disposing genes could be identified. Why anyone would wonder off that path into psychological/trauma territory isn't at all clear to me. Probably sums these folks up the answer to all is psychological/trauma ---

 

Depends. If the job is to publish papers, as many papers as possible, they're doing their job. And it is.

I think it's fair to say that academic publishing is about publishing papers and nothing else. Whether they are any useful, or accurate, is not anyone's actual job. Even when errors are found out and pointed to an editor, we've seen this many times, they're basically puzzled and respond with "well, what do you want me to do here?". This happened to Tuller many times.

I remember at one point Sharpe responded to someone about how PACE had harmed him. He said he doesn't know the person (as if this changes anything) and that his job is to write clear papers, or something close to that. To write "clear papers". That's it.

He writes papers. The papers get published. This gets him more funding to publishe more useless papers. The editors skim the papers and hit the publish button, even if half the peer reviewers admit they didn't even read the paper. That's the job. Science has taken a back seat, it no longer even matters since the job is simply to publish papers, even worthless ones.

It's a cultural problem, the damn Iron law of institutions. Academic medicine has basically become the Catholic church to Galileo, it exists to preserve a power structure, everything else is secondary. Marketing above knowledge, reputation far above outcomes.