Use of EEfRT in the NIH study: Deep phenotyping of PI-ME/CFS, 2024, Walitt et al

My mapMECFS.org account is pending. Can you share the rewards chart here?

 

I don't know but I think I'm going to get the play the 2022 version of the game tomorrow, i'll let you know if it denotes a separate "virtual reward" for the total at the end.

 

You sign a user agreement that says you cannot share the data except with others registered with mapMECFS. So you can analyse the data and share the results of that analysis, but not the data. My account came through within a day, so you shouldn't be waiting long.

 

Yes, you're right.

 

From part 2 of Jeanette's blog:

Does the part in brackets mean that her analysis of virtual rewards won excludes the five patients she argues should have been excluded? Ns would be helpful.

 

Apologies if this has already been addressed. I am still reading through and on page 18 of 35. Was there ever a chart of all the participants "PHTC" posted?

 

What do you mean by PHTC?

 

I think so. Without excluding those 5, the controls would have a higher amount of 'virtual rewards':
https://www.s4me.info/threads/use-o...s-2024-walitt-et-al.37463/page-33#post-537825

 

Very helpful post. I had seen it, and then apparently erased it from my brain.

 

"Effort preference, the decision to avoid the harder task when decision-making is unsupervised and reward values and probabilities of receiving a reward are standardized, was estimated using the Proportion of Hard-Task Choices (PHTC) metric.

Is this the same thing as this chart re: proportion of hard trials?

Did anyone make a chart of this? In my view Sam is exactly right and IMO a box and whisker chart for this would be perfect. How can the key difference between HV and ME/CFS be effort preference if there is a huge overlap in the scatter plot.

 

Hope that this is what you mean:

 

Below are some graphs from earlier posts. @Murph and @ME/CFS Skeptic also made some graphs, I also posted some other graphs elsewhere, so did some others, it was all somewhat earlier in this thread.

 

Yes! is this calculation "The primary measure of the EEfRT task is Proportion of Hard Task Choices (effort preference). This behavioral measure is the ratio of the number of times the hard task was selected compared to the number of times the easy task was selected. This metric is used to estimate effort preference, the decision to avoid the harder task when decision-making is unsupervised and reward values and probabilities of receiving a reward are standardized." ?

or is it the number of hard task selected compared to the total number of trials?

I believe I messed that up in the chart I created using your previous data.

 

There's also this graph that shows the mean of hard task choices per group as the trials progressed, originally posted here:
https://www.s4me.info/threads/use-o...s-2024-walitt-et-al.37463/page-24#post-520344

 

No I initially used the number of hard task divided by the total number of trials because that is easier to interpret.

I suspect they use this ratio because odds are easier to work with in statistical modelling but when plotting the raw data I think that dividing by the total number of trials is more straightforward (compared to the ratio of hard/easy tasks).

If I try to plot the ratio it looks like this:


Note that this is not exactly the same as their primary outcome measure because the latter refers to the result of statistical modelling that takes sex, reward, probability of reward, trial and expected value into account. @andrewkq, I and others tried to replicate their modelling and got similar but not identical results.

 

Are "choice times" of 5, removed? As those weren't choices, but selected by the computer due to no input. This appears to occur 22 times.

 

In the data and graphs I used, no. I suspect Walitt et al. did not exclude them either because they don't mention this in the paper and the data sheet says that those with 5s choice time had valid data (Valid Data_is_1 = 1). If I remember correctly, Treadway et al. said that these should be removed though.

Don't think this is an important point because only 22 out of the 1441 rows had a choice time of 5. I've redone the analysis and graph above without those with a choice time of 5s and it seems to have no influence.

 

Someone decided to make this the 3rd sentence of the abstract. "Among the many physical and cognitive complaints, one defining feature of PI-ME/CFS was an alteration of effort preference, rather than physical or central fatigue, due to dysfunction of integrative brain regions potentially associated with central catechol pathway dysregulation, with consequences on autonomic functioning and physical conditioning."

and then go on to try to correlate "effort preference" with every other variable in the study....

 

I wish I could join. What little mental capacity I have is being overused to keep up with paperwork for SSDI (our disability benefits).

just saying hello & checking in to catch up.

but can’t even comprehend much today!

Hope you all are doing well!!!