Review Interventions for the management of long covid post-covid condition: living systematic review, 2024, Zeraatkar, Flottorp, Garner, Busse+

that's an excellent blog.

 

https://twitter.com/user/status/1864427372881015151

 

Another excellent takedown. I hope you can work with David and others to make sure all of this gets back to the editor.

 

Still waiting on the peer review details, https://www.bmj.com/content/387/bmj-2024-081318/peer-review. They say, "Please note that it may take up to 5 days for the peer review documents to appear.". I won't be surprised if they aren't made available.

 

Thinking about this again after reading @ME/CFS Skeptic’s blog it occurs to me that what has happened is even more absurd. First, two badly designed studies (ReCover and REGAIN) have been published which provide no reliable evidence of efficacy of the interventions. Then the BMJ authors have done a “meta analysis” using those single studies for each outcome, which inflates the estimate of the effects sizes, resulting in recommendations that are not supported by the original datasets. Then the conclusions of the so-called meta analysis are spun to the media which inflates the already inflated results of the meta analysis, leading to headlines which suggests that CBT and rehab are not only effective treatments but probable cures.

 

How does it work in reality with these? can they sit it out waiting for ones they like to come through and then if not enough of those then they twiddle their thumbs about whether to let a critique through to make up the five or wait fur s friendly to pen something ?

 

I didn't realize The BMJ has open peer review. that should be interesting.

 

Who knows? I certainly don't.

From the link they say, "In rare instances we determine after careful consideration that we should not make certain portions of the prepublication record publicly available. For example, in cases of stigmatised illnesses we seek to protect the confidentiality of reviewers who have these illnesses. In other instances there may be legal or regulatory considerations that make it inadvisable or impermissible to make available certain parts of the prepublication record.", so I wouldn't be surprised if they don't publish it using this clause as reason.

 

@ME/CFS Skeptic's excellent response has now been published: https://www.bmj.com/content/387/bmj-2024-081318/rr-5

 

There's also another new, critical response from someone who seems to work in clinical evidence synthesis and medical statistics: https://www.bmj.com/content/387/bmj-2024-081318/rr-4

 

It seems to highlight similar problems as ours:

Hoping that the editors take notice.

 

I think they will. At least, the authors will have to respond. Doesn't mean they'll agree, unfortunately.

 

I do not know how formal the rapid response system is. Is it expected that the authors respond?

 

"As authors have an academic duty to respond to substantive criticism of their work, BMJ expects authors to post their own rapid response in reply to any such comments."

https://authors.bmj.com/after-submitting/rapid-responses/

 

They generally do. But with REGAIN, they responded in a rapid review that nothing needed to be fixed. But a month later, the journal posted a correction anyone, without explaining why they overrode the views of the authors.

 

Sent a letter this morning to The BMJ: https://virology.ws/2024/12/09/tria...n-new-review-of-interventions-for-long-covid/

 

It's now been two weeks.

 

Looking at the other two peer-reviewed papers published alongside this one in BMJ 387:8450 (link, link), one has had the peer-review documentation published but the other has not.

 

I wonder if the fact that they called it a "living" systematic review is exactly because they have insufficient crumbs to use for the interventions they want to promote (CBT & exercise). So that when the inevitable criticism comes that bringing in 1 study for each main conclusion is not a "systematic review" they'll go: "Well, duh, it's living, it will be updated with additional publications."

Which would still make no sense for an organisation for which creating "living" systematic reviews can be appropriate (like Cochrane), and would be utterly ridiculous for what is just a journal publication.

(Handy if that's allowed if you want to produce smoke & mirror reference fodder for the promotion of your preferred intervention though.)


Edited to add: sorry if this has already been mentioned - I'm following this thread a bit, but haven't read it all.