COFFI - The international collaborative on fatigue following infection

How ironic. This should have been the direction of travel since 1989 when there was a paper saying aetiology is not important, and allowing for the broadening of criteria until research was meaningless. Done by anybody else.....

Given discussion on a recent thread, suggestions as to what they can do with their COFFI are not encouraged.

 

My thought was more along the lines of "global BPS circle jerk."

 

Why the hell would it take 14 months to get this accepted for publishing?

I've used the Wayback Machine to capture all the pages on their website, including the minutes from their one and only recorded meeting.

 

https://twitter.com/user/status/954766867310182400

 

I find it "interesting" that Ben Katz and Renee Taylor are in this group --- both are/have been collaborators with Lenny Jason....

 

@Tom Kindlon point that fitness was measured post infection is lethal to the argument: you can’t have an (unfixed) risk factor that occurs/is measured after the event. Lower physical fitness is more likely to be linked to the severity of the acute infection, putting things in a very different light.

That’s disappointing from the authors, and the reviewers who failed to pick it up. The basic idea behind this study is very interesting, but given the psychosocial illness beliefs of almost all the researchers, my fear is that this will not drive the science forward.

 

I agree.

 

Knut-Arne Wensaas was a new name for me. He's done research on the aftermaths of an outbreak of the parasite Giardia. He is currently working on a post doctorate project called "Irritable bowel syndrome and chronic fatigue following infection with Giardia lamblia. Premorbid factors and long-term consequences".

Quite a few developed ME after an outbreak of Giardia in Bergen, Norway in 2004. I think this was the first time one was certain of the pathogen leading to an epidemic of ME, and some doctors/researchers had at least heard about the disease, so of course this was interesting to investigate. But my impression is that the researchers behind the projects on the long term consequences following this giardia-outbreak all had (have?) a biopsychosocial approach to ME.

 

A few bits from their 2015 meeting report:

Still waiting for any worthwhile data on this:

Don't think I knew of this:

I hope they don't/didn't get NIH funding:

 

I think this may be a posthumous publication.

 

I don't understand what you mean by this.

 

A lot of water has flowed under the bridge since early 2016. I rather suspect Coffi may, like David Hume's great treatise, fall stillborn from the press.

 

I somewhat disagree.

There is value in following up these cohort studies to investigate factors that we currently lack evidence on, long term prognosis for example. Though they would ideally adopt fairly rigorous methods of defining recovery and estimating levels of disability, rather than the usual non-specific questionnaires that are not totally relevant in the context of ME or CFS...

Pooling the results together makes the findings more reliable, hence the notable finding of psychological factors not being predictive factors of post viral fatigue when the studies are pooled together. (Also notable given that many of the researchers involved strongly believe that psychological factors play an important role).

 

Anybody noticed Buchwald in there, the Seattle psychologizer and epidemiologist, also much involved in pelvic pain research and the ‘all in your head’ connection?