Star Advertiser: Is chronic fatigue syndrome real? [Dr Oz claiming that there is a test for ME/CFS]

Not that his answer is that bad but that test he references is from Columbia's paper of last year, so not replicated or even available to the general public.

https://www.staradvertiser.com/2019/02/13/features/is-chronic-fatigue-syndrome-real/

 

The affliction usually affects folks age 40 to 60, most often women and Caucasians.
(my bold)

Is that true? As far as I know this has not been looked in to that much. I only know of Leonard Jason et als "The prevalence of Chronic Fatigue Syndrome in Nigeria" (2007) which showed the prevalence was somewhat higher in Nigeria compared with rates from CFS epidemiological studies in USA. Not enough to conclude anything but there are no grounds to state that caucasians are more affected in general, are there?

There seems to be more patients diagnosed with ME in Norway than in the neighbour country Sweden. One of the reasons might be more awareness about ME among health care workers and patients (much thanks to the Norwegian ME Association's over 30 year long existence), but there's no reason to believe the prevalence is any lower in Sweden.

There are too many unknown factors for such conclusions from Star Advertiser.

 

Old myths die hard. This was basically the original myth: bored upper middle-class housewife affliction. Confirmation bias at its best.

 

He could be just quoting the CDC and misquoting the NAM report.

 

Ad. caucasian women having higher risk - Jason et al found contrary data. From the paper "CFS: A Review of Epidemiology and Natural History Studies"

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3021257/

 

Below is Columbia's July 2018 write up on how the combined results of microbiome and metabolite testing identified ME/CFS patients 84% of the time. As @Andy said, it needs to be replicated, and it's not a clinical test but something that I imagine can only be found in research settings. Still, if you could be confident that 84% of the subjects in your study actually had the same condition, that would probably be a huge step forward for ME/CFS research.

https://www.mailman.columbia.edu/pu...s-get-us-closer-test-chronic-fatigue-syndrome

 

I'd say no it is not.

It is hard to say, but population based studies have found similar (often higher, but that could be due to methodological difference) prevalence in South American and Asian populations, as well as in non-white populations in the USA and UK.