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"be not the first by whom the new is tried, Nor yet the last to lay the old aside"

Any idea what oxidative damage is supposed to mean?

I wouldn't be terrified. I have been going deaf for twenty years and am now severely deaf but with good modern aids it makes very little difference to my life. Deafness does not cause dementia or Parkinson's as far as I know. It is just correlated.

Yeah well, you said it. And we are very aware of the ethical issue and we spend hours arguing with each other to try and ensure that we are not putting out stuff that is misleading. When we put stuff out in fact sheets we try to stick to evidence and realities having spent thousands of hours...

A sensible lay person should have worked out by the time they are 18 that people talk nonsense all the time, especially experts, and that nothing should be taken as authoritative. And that being the case they have no business to be passing any of this stuff on as if they were themselves...

That was the old 1955 myth. Polio is an enterovirus. Acheson, or one of those, proposed that "ME" was an unknown polio-like enterovirus. John Chia picked up on this much later but it is a bit like going back to believing that malaria is due to bad air (mal aria). This is the level of of idiocy...

Ah, that's a confusing figure. So it is a best fit of 3% with very wide uncertainty, including 10-25%! I still go for 10-25%.

It's a bit of a mess, yes, but I read it like this: DecodeME points to 9.5%+ . The Biobank data at 8%+ is similar. The insurance twin study doesn't look plausible. If h2 was 48% I think that would have been clinically obvious. It is a bit hard to know why this one should be so out of line but I...

I don't actually know where sex ratio figures in h2 estimates - whether it is hived off as a separate issue.

Yes, that is my understanding. However, my memory is that other data fit with ~10% and Chris gave the impression (I thought) that there were reasons to think this was most of the risk. My guess is that if genes are really rare they don't make much difference and if they aren't rare then it is a...

I think one can take concussion or ECT as examples where we have reason to think synapses get broken up. You get amnesia and lose memory for past events and you can also get loss of procedural memory. That means you get a fork out to beat an egg and your arm doesn't remember how to do it without...

I think there is a complicated fudge calculation that takes into account the relative risk for the regions that look reliable results. I think it is probably given in the paper but the calculation will not have been described in detail. It may be an underestimate but it seems to fit with most...

The 10% comes from various sources, including DecodeME. As Kitty says it is not about individual cases. At least 70% of cases are a bit genetic because they are women and two X chromosomes is genetic and confers risk. But for two any two identical female twins if one gets ME/CFS the chance of...

Ancient history often continues to be taught for decades.

But Simon Wessely did precisely that 40 years ago. And the theories put in place after he had scarpered fell apart with PACE. This is ancient history.

We are in that place. We know a good deal about the biology. We have rather precise replicated data on demographics with about 0.8% prevalence and two age peaks. We have replicated data relating to association with EBV and several other infections. We have what looks like a reliable estimate of...

The idea that the advocacy groups and charities will want to replace ICC ME with BPS seems to me somewhat comical!!

I think the focus on theory is at the heart of it. Also the implication that the theory predicts harms we do not have evidence for. The PEM/PENE distinction reflects of the theoretical mindset of the ICC group. As has been said, it is fabricated and sounds uncomfortably like an exclusive club...

To me these are just standard pathways that are likely to be involved in brain damage. If you cut any one pathway you tend to see an improvement in an animal model set up to be bad enough to measure but not so bad nothing can alter it. T cells will activate microglia, yes. In brain that is...

I can't really follow the point @Midnattsol. You said standing up against doctors. We are not talking about whether it is right or wrong for doctors to ignore patients. It is obvious that is wrong. The issue is the potential harm from patients putting out misleading information to others, who...