Towards personalized assessment of fatigue perpetuating factors in patients with [CFS] using ecological momentary assessment, 2020, Knoop et al

Towards personalized assessment of fatigue perpetuating factors in patients with chronic fatigue syndrome using ecological momentary assessment: A pilot study

https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0022399920308588

I have no idea what relation this "conclusion" has to do with the content of a pilot study, but whatever.

I'm only posting this for the sheer absurdity of it all. I have no words here for this mediocrity. These people are completely lost in an ideological copy-pasting circle jerk.

 

Do any of these researchers have any understanding of the difference between ‘association’ and ‘causality’?

I have observed that people undergoing surgery wear hospital gowns, so we should be discouraging people from wearing hospital gowns in order to reduce the need for surgical interventions.

[added - obviously wearing hospital gowns is a sickness behaviour that perpetuates the patient’s false beliefs and CBT aimed at getting surgical patients to not wear gowns is what is needed here. Just think how much money this will save. Obviously this intervention will need to be personalised as in different people wearing hospital gowns results in different surgical being needed or even for some no surgery at all.]

 

I haven't read it. But it sounds like a way of admitting that not all patients are the same and need the exact same treatments, so it seems on its face to undermine or be backtracking from previous assertions. But as I said, I haven't read it. Life's too short.

 

It's psychosomatic research. It seems to be real but it is just a manifestation of the authors distorted beliefs.
I was a bit confused about perpetuating factors that didn't;t perpetuate though.

 

Is it maladaptive behaviour to keep on, and on, with publishing these views?

 

Are you slacking, @dave30th ?

 

In a goldfish bowl where publishing is the only source of reward, maybe not.

 

What new insights??

 

The title was so absurd that I had to check the thread.

 

Ecological momentary assessment conjures up the action immediately prior to moving ones boot just a bit to one side when walking on a country path to avoid some unpleasantness.

 

In this case they seem to have left their movement ready prepared in its own paper .

 

I am not sure the word is allowed but i will try... why are these people allowed to bullshit like this? Don’t they know that a minute change in daily routine, or a change in their thoughts will not change disease status? And don’t they dare trying that on Long-Covid patients.

if you don’t have anything smart to say, or if you don’t have any good idea, perhaps the best way forward is to do nothing, say nothing and don’t publish anything.

 

Don't feed the psychiatrolls...

 

Can anyone help get access to the article?

Many thanks in advance

 

I had a read of the article, not every word, but I think enough to get the main message.

What they did: They asked people to respond to various questions at regular times throughout the day for 15 days, and they also got them to wear an actometer. The measures included how happy/sad/anxious the person felt, how much they were focusing on their symptoms/catastrophising and so on. The also got them to report on the level of fatigue they felt.

The idea was to see what factors were "perpetuating:" the self-reported fatigue.

Using factor analysis, they then reduced the number of measures, and came up with two main factors - activity (self-reported/objectively measured etc), and negative psycho-stuff (all the rest of the psycho stuff, but with happy/cheerful etc. obviously working in the reverse direction to the catastrophising and other bad stuff).

They kept the self-reported fatigue measures out of the factor analysis because that was the “outcome” measure.

They then looked at the correlation between the activity factor at a given timepoint and self-rated fatigue at the next timepoint. They did the same for the psycho-stuff factor. I think they were hoping to show that high scores on the negative psycho-stuff measure and/or low activity would predict greater fatigue at the next timepoint.

What they found: The associations - at least at the group level - were remarkably weak. Even the ones you'd expect would be strongly associated with each other weren’t very strongly associated - like you’d expect more activity at T1 to predict more activity at T2, because the activity measure would distinguish those with milder symptoms from those that are more severely affected. People were all over the place, with no strong consistent patterns of association.

But these guys, not wanting to produce a negative conclusion, talked up the idea of individuals varying respect to these associations. There is really no reason I can see for preferring this explanation over the other obvious one - that this is all just meaningless noise (a noise account would also predict the associations would vary all over the place form person to person, because, well, its noise).

My evaluation: Everything looks fairly cautious and carefully reported, except for the conclusions, which are well out of line with the incredibly negative results. It seems to be the conclusions where these researchers really create the lie. Just look at the title, and how it misrepresents the actual results - their pants are totally on fire.