Chronic Fatigue Syndrome and Occupational Status: A Retrospective Longitudinal Study, 2021, Chalder et al

What is the likelihood that they used the Oxford case definition, which includes patients who may feel tired but turn out to no be true ME patients?

 

good point - what was work status over time - full time / part time/ voluntary ????? and average hours worked.

 

full paper


Chronic fatigue syndrome and occupational status

 

I had this question too. The numbers make no sense.

 

Also, it is rich to have Chalder calling for work-related outcomes given that the PACE authors rejected the objectivity of this measure in the end because it didn't yield any positive results. They dismissed it because economic changes meant that getting back to work was not necessarily just up to patients.

 

"Patients fulfilled NICE criteria for CFS [12].
12. Sharpe MC, Archard LC, Banatvala JE et al. A report—chronic fatigue syndrome: guidelines for research. J Royal Soc Med 1991;84:118–121."

 

"Unhelpful beliefs such as fear of activity and exercise and concerns about causing damage, combined with all or nothing behaviour and behavioural avoidance, were associated with not working and are specifically targeted in CBT and, to some extent, GET"

 

Ok, Chalder appears to have mis-written the abstract, judging by the full paper. She did not mean that 53% of those who were in employment at baseline stayed in employment. That's incorrect. According to the actual data, 53% of the entire sample of 316 was employed at both baseline and follow-up--not just 53% of those employed at baseline. This is a case of people so clueless and so indifferent to language and meaning that they don't actually notice that what they write makes no sense.

 

So they're making up that they used NICE criteria, I guess?

 

Hard to decide if this is incredibly proactive, or if someone just discovered the search/replace function..

 

https://www.virology.ws/2021/12/07/...-in-new-paper-on-cfs-and-employment-outcomes/

 

@dave30th you are underselling your work. Here is the full title of your piece:

Trial By Error: Professor Chalder Messes Up Again in New Paper on CFS and Employment Outcomes

 

Ha! I'm a modest guy!

 

in reading it again, it seems they repeat the same mistake about 6% and 9% in the discussion section as well, identifying the wrong denominator. I'd missed that.

 

It’s confusing.

So 9% of the whole cohort had a change from “not working” to “working”.
Would this statistic have not looked “better” (from Chalder’s pov) if it had been expressed as the percentage of the “not working” returning to work? Ie the % would have been a higher number.

Perhaps that error was made so it could also be made with regards to the 6%.

So, let’s see, 6% of the whole cohort had a change from “working” to “not working”.

This would also be a bigger percentage if expressed as a percentage of those “working” at the start.

Actually, IF only 6% of the entire cohort were “working” at the start (sorry I’ve not looked at the actual figures) then this could mean that a full 100% of the working-at-start group had to stop work!

I wonder what that actual figure is?
Is that the figure that needed obfuscation?

Statistics eh!

PS Okay found some percentages, so it’s not my extreme suggestion. Yet it does seem a weird error to make.

 

Back of the envelope calculations:

Am I right in estimating
10% of the working group had to stop work and
21% of those not working were able to start work?

Are these not figures that would look better from her pov?

What have I missed?