Prevalence of functional somatic syndromes and bodily distress syndrome in the Danish population: the DanFunD study, 2019, Petersen et al

Not when I see the name Per Fink.

Excuse me while I apply a simple heuristic.

 

projectile_vomit.exe?

A classic.

 

M commentary on this study has now been published: “Letter to the Editor: A misleading CFS prevalence estimate in DanFunD”
https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10.1177/1403494819893240

Thanks to @Graham and @Robert 1973 for their feedback on early drafts.

Social media summary:

It’s a commentary on a Danish study by the research team of Marie Peterson and Per Fink who are looking at functional somatic syndromes. In this study, they report a prevalence rate for Chronic Fatigue Syndrome (CFS) of 8.6%, which is probably the highest CFS prevalence rate ever reported in the literature.

In my commentary, I argue that the authors have measured fatigue symptoms in the general population, not CFS and that it would be more accurate if their terminology reflected this. In addition, I note that their study could have used other information to estimate CFS prevalence as for 77% of the sample, the prevalence of self-reported CFS was available, reaching an average of 1,19%.

The commentary is behind a paywall, but you can view the submitted version on my Researchgate profile:
https://www.researchgate.net/publication/339181335_A_misleading_CFS_prevalence_estimate_in_DanFunD

The authors have written a response to my commentary, which can be found here:
https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10.1177/1403494819893241

 

Which makes me wonder why as a rheumatologist seeing hundreds of new patients a year for thirty years I can recall seeing no more than a dozen people who I now realise had ME/CFS. Maybe ME/CFS is not referred specifically to rheumatologists but at least I should have seen more people with CFS just by coincidence. By their estimate it seems I should have seen 500.

 

Personally, I think they're just phishing . . .

 

Since the response is paywalled, what's the gist of it?

 

Notably, the finding that 8.6% of the population has "severe and abnormal fatigue" due to a variety of causes creates doubt over the validity of the cutoffs of the SF-36 used by certain authors describing "normal" cutoffs based on general population means and SDs (where the normal population is defined as being above the ~15th percentile).

 

Well, they agree with Michiel that the number is inflated and they should have indicated it was a number for CF and not CFS, and they also agree that the fatigue could be because of having had a baby or house renovations. Then there's more yaba-yaba and then they say they will consider more specific CFS criteria in future analyses. They blinked--and then pretended they didn't.

Well done, Michiel!

 

Complete BS answer and justification. These people are utterly clueless and lost in the maze of their own minds.

Yes, definitions of ME/CFS include the symptoms of ME/CFS. That is literally the idea and deciding otherwise out of personal preference is exactly as absurd as changing your criteria mid-trial because you prefer the results.

Seriously this field is by far the least serious, least capable and most woo-filled field in all of science and nothing even comes close.

 

I liked their tactic of talking about being 'open-minded' about re-defining CFS in a way which would lead to 8.6% of the population being given the diagnosis. Very subtle. 'Our work may seem absurd to the closed minded...'

 

Well, that was a bit of woolly waffle in the reply, wasn't it. Unavoidable I suppose, given the undefined (imaginary?) nature of so-called functional somatic disorders. That they keep on presenting themselves as open-minded would be almost funny if it wasn't so damaging. The DanFunD could have great potential for valuable epidemiological insights if it was left to genuinely open-minded researchers who don't try to pigeonhole everybody with any not immediately explainable symptoms into the FSD box.

But they still had to agree with @Michiel Tack:

Good one Michiel

 

Thanks @Michiel Tack

Absolutely fantastic

 

Irritable bowel, chronic widespread pain, chronic fatigue and related syndromes are prevalent and highly overlapping in the general population: DanFunD

Petersen, Per Fink et al
Published 24 Feb 2020

https://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-020-60318-6

 

Isn't it circular reasoning to use fairly non-specific criteria and then claim that all the syndromes overlap?

No shit!

Wait, post-hoc?

And yes, they really cited the Chalder "Development of a fatigue scale" study as their "criteria" for Chronic Fatigue.

 

We invented a group of spurious syndromes to disappear certain illnesses then dumped them all together under one label then found that they overlapped and we were very surprised because even though the catch all category was designed to bury all other categories together... it did.

We did this by citing all of our own years of nonsense and it led us to a conclusion.

Next up

There's only one race..the human race.

All humans are mammals.

All mammals are animals.

All animals are on earth.

Earth is a category.


"I see so if you test someone for a broken arm in the future how will you do that?"

"We will look at the earth from space."

 

This stuff is beyond parody because unlike parody it's meant to be serious and people generally don't die or live a life of suffering because of one particular parody. Although, just like many parodies, this actually features a clown.



Good things they aren't geologists or biologists because good luck arguing to people about your special science category of "massive gray things" that features (some) rocks, elephants and clouds. Experts are not supposed to be duped over superficial similarities. This is so pathetic.