Unwilling or unable? Interpreting effort task performance in myalgic encephalomyelitis/chronic fatigue syndrome, 2025, Kirvin-Quamme et al

ME/CFS Skeptic said:
Bit unfortunate though that the commentary was not published in the original journal and that Walitt et al. were not urged to respond to it. I thought this was the original plan: is it possible to give some background on what happened? Did the journal reject it?
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Indeed. Yes, we submitted our manuscript to Nature Comms as a Matters Arising. When you’re submitting a Matters Arising, you’re “strongly encouraged” to first send it to the authors, and we did this in July 2024. We had an extensive email exchange with the NIH team in July and August 2024, before submitting our manuscript to the journal in September 2024. We were advised in October 2024 that “another Matters Arising highlighting these criticisms is currently under consideration at our journal” and the two articles would “reiterate arguments”, so ours would not be considered. Ours was not sent to reviewers at Nature Comms.

To date, we are not aware of any Matters Arising addressing the Walitt et al. study that has been published. If the “This article is cited by” section at the bottom of Walitt et al.’s paper is comprehensive, then no Matters Arising articles have been published. However, we do know that three Matters Arising had been submitted by July 2024, as Dr Walitt advised us of this in our email exchange.

Ultimately, our paper is stronger for having gone through a longer journey to publication, as it went through improvements at each step. The first time it got reviewed, it got accepted, which is heartening. And we think it's found a good home in Frontiers in Psychology.
 
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Simon M said:
An SF 36 physical function of under 30 is lower than usual in clinical cohorts, I think. IIRC, the pace trial was mid 30s.
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Yeah, you're right. I'm going to be obnoxious and quote myself Kirke 2018!
GETSET's sample was higher-functioning than in previous trials, with a baseline mean SF-36 PF score of 49, compared to PACE's 38 and FINE's 30.1,3,4 Housebound patients have been reported to have a mean SF-36 PF of 17.5
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There was a bit of conversation above about an email Prof Treadway sent to a forum user in March 2024. In September 2024, John Bolecek wrote here:
In an email, Treadway told me it is “important to confirm that both groups were able to complete the easy and hard tasks at equally high rates.” The ME/CFS participants’ lower completion rate for hard tasks could suggest those participants made a “rational decision” based on their ability, rather than a difference in “effort preference,” he said. Furthermore, he stressed the importance of individually calibrating button pressing speed to distinguish preference from ability, which NIH failed to do.
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