Beyond Bones - relevance of variants of connective tissue (Hypermobility) to Fibromyalgia, ME/CFS - Eccles et al Feb 2020

From: Dr. Marc-Alexander Fluks

 

I am reading the paper. This made me stop reading.

Selection bias? A group of patients who were engaged in design of the study went back to their community to let them know there was a study on hypermobility and ME and or FM.

if the recruitment was done on successive patients presenting in a program, self-selection would not be a problem. But it is right in your face.

 

It is a bit like Michael Sharpe saying that they changed the definition of recovery to get results more in keeping with what they expected.

It would be hard to make more basic errors even if you tried.

 

If the numbers look too good to be true, well maybe they are. Then you see zebra everywhere, and you forget that you are in the zebra exhibit of the safari park and you fail to see people wearing zebra costumes gallivanting in said exhibit

 

Had another look at this paper which says:

The authors do not report it but using a chi square test, this difference was not statistically significant (X-squared = 0.53414, df = 1, p-value = 0.4649). Also note how high the prevalence of hEDS is (8%) compared to the often cited figure for hEDS of 1/5000 (0.02%). It's 400 times higher!

Similarly here:

This difference was also not statistically significant (X-squared = 1.4019, df = 1, p-value = 0.2364).

The Brighton criteria showed a significant difference (37% versus 81%, p= 0.001) but that is likely because arthralgia plays an important role in meeting these criteria, hence why 81% of patients had it.