Patterns of daytime physical activity in patients with chronic fatigue syndrome, 2020, Chalder, Sharpe, White et al

Does this look to anyone else like they couldn't get a serious journal to publish this and basically self-published? Look at the the board of this backwater journal, basically a who's who of quackery.

 

Isn't this one of the reasons you do not do post hoc analyses? If you've not stated beforehand what you intend to do, then if not careful can find all manner of supposedly meaningful patterns in the data that can fit the bias of choice?

 

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Post_hoc_analysis

Basically once you've had the chance to root around in the data, over and over in all manner of different ways, the odds are you will home in on some apparent pattern that seems to support whatever argument you choose to promote. Hence:

 

http://unbiasedresearch.blogspot.com/2017/04/pre-hoc-vs-post-hoc-analysis-whats.html

[my highlighting]

 

https://twitter.com/user/status/1266305956499111936

 

@JohnTheJack would it be worth considering a further FOI request for the remaining PACE data, anonymised of course? This latest endeavour of the PACE authors clearly undermines an objection they might seek to resurrect - that they no longer have access to a statistician for the PACE data.

If so then would have to take into account (discussed elsewhere in S4ME), that any new data must include adequate keys to be able to unambiguously synchronise it with previously acquired data. Or better still, just ask for the whole anonymised set anyway?

 

Uh. Good catch. Another lie exposed, again. Official lie, even.

 

nice one.

 

Just read this paper.Incredulous that it was published until I saw the comment about the editorial board of the journal.

The paper states the following, suggesting that PACE is going to keep "giving" into its second decade.

"It may be that the physically inactive group improve by doing more, the physically active group by doing less, and the boom and bust group by stabilising their activity with no consequent change in overall activity levels. This hypothesis requires testing. Whether these sub-groups do predict treatment outcome will be assessed in a future paper."
​

 

Good spot. Probably explains why my recent letter to the journal was rejected

 

OMG this is just shocking: "Gradually increasing the intensity of your exercise over time may help reduce your hypersensitivity to exercise, just like allergy shots gradually reduce a person's hypersensitivity to a particular allergen." WTF...............

 

That was the plan at the start of the trial. By the time the protocol was published they'd dropped actometers as an outcome measure, and they don't have the data needed to publish according to the original plan. I'm not sure that's really selective reporting?

 

Yeah, I wrote about that here: https://www.virology.ws/2019/12/10/trial-by-error-mayo-clinics-crappy-website/

 

In my understanding one should well elevate central sensitation this way, at least this should be the possibility when central sensitation is too strong, I would mathematically guess.

 

Didn't work for me, I tried allergy shots for 2 years and I still sneeze when the hazel's out. It was bugger all use. So it would be quite a fair analogy actually, except that allergy shots rarely leave people wheelchair bound and unable to tolerate light or sound.

 

Reminds me of the glucose analogy that a certain someone likes to mention occasionally...

 

Is that paper one of the PACE trial investigators' attempts at convincing clinicians that BPS research on ME/CFS is able to generate reliable evidence?

(I'm actually searching for another reference: If I remember correctly, in one of the PACE trial papers the authors concluded that they found no evidence of significant differences between subgroups with different diagnostic criteria. I don't remember whether one of these diagnostic criteria included PEM though. [???] )