Trial Report REGAIN: A Randomized Controlled Clinical Trial of Oxaloacetate for Improving the Symptoms of Long COVID, 2025, Vernon et al

[ME/CFS Skeptic]

I think there is clearly no effect for fatigue or physical functioning, but the scores on the cognitive test (the DANA Brain Vital) do seem to show an improvement in the treatment group compared to controls.

 

[ME/CFS Skeptic]

The authors used percentage difference scores from visit 1, which often makes the analysis more sensitive to outliers (e.g. participants who had a very low score to start with, could improve by 80-100%). So it would be interesting to check if the results hold up if they used the absolute scores (while controlling for baseline scores in a regression model).

 

[ME/CFS Skeptic]

For other outcome measures they used Tukey's post hoc HSD but for the cognitive testing they used a linear mixed-effects model where it isn't clear if they corrected for multiple comparisons.

 

[Utsikt]

The authors used percentage difference scores from visit 1, which often makes the analysis more sensitive to outliers (e.g. participants who had a very low score to start with, could improve by 80-100%). So it would be interesting to check if the results hold up if they used the absolute scores (while controlling for baseline scores in a regression model).

It seems like they sometimes used percentages and sometimes absolute values. I don’t know of they had a protocol or what it said.

 

[ME/CFS Skeptic]

It’s very frustrating for me to see people I genuinely care about all over bluesky starting to worry about saving up to try this supplement. I don’t have the energy to argue-explain to every one of them that this study isn’t very good…

Made some comments about it here:

 

[Yann04]

Made some comments about it here:

Amazing!