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In view of the particularity of psychological intervention, which is difficult to achieve blinding, in this study, the overall rating of RoB2 had not considered blinding. So there is no attempt to connect with the real world, where reliability is a matter of fact, not choice. There must be a...

Could well be. But things ahve not always been as they are. I remember ten years ago a close Spanish friend (of 60 years standing) saying to me "Who would have thought the day would come when people in England would look to Spain as a place with cleaner toilets and a safer more effective...

Isn't this a rather psychologising analysis ? ;)

I agree. It is a muddle. Objective means various things and always will. The 'need to change' is something of a straw man. I find 'stigma' unhelpful, too. There are no stigmas floating about attaching to things, just other human beings being kind or unkind, informed or ill-informed.

I think the problem with IL-6, CRP or ESR is that if you take a population of people who are unwell they are almost certainly going to be contaminated with co-existent subclinical inflammatory disease of all sorts. So to my mind a slight statistical shift in IL-6 is impossible to make much of...

https://meassociation.org.uk/2025/10/update-ldn-clinical-trial-progress-report-july-september-2025/

Useful ForwardME service subgroup meeting today. The government may be in cloud-cuckoo land but the advocacy groups are talking constructively and some useful suggestions emerged about contacting key people. Sonya has a lot going on so Clare Ogden joined us and I think she found it useful to get...

I think that is a very pertinent question. Sickness behaviour seems to be explained by some well known cytokine activators but in reality you can have all sorts of different patterns of the various features in different proportions and time courses. There is probably a ot more to know.

I had a look at pressure numbers. Average venular pressure is said to be 10-20mmHg - say 15mmHg. CSF pressure is said to be 5-15mmHg - say 10mmHg. But brain venules are free draining into an external jugular vein with a subatmospheric pressure (above the "JVP" line and collapsed) where most...

I just think talking of 'vagus nerve' here is unhelpful. It is a bit like the channel tunnel, carrying both rail and road freight in all directions and no particular reason to think that it carries the cocaine bags any more than any other road or railway. If they were looking for inflammation...

I think this study suffers from all the usual sort of circular arguments about discriminatory tests. The comment about persistent virus and autoimmunity is just pasting in received dogma. Differences in IgG class responses might be a clue to a mechanism but Long Covid is so vague and...

All of those things, but not necessarily in that order with such complexity that it would take a lifetime to learn it all!!

I don't think one can compare Grok/X with WWW quite so simply!! ANd of course Sir Tim never wanted to patent it.

I don't think there is much doubt about that. The incidence peak at the first intimate kissing age is pretty clear cut. Beyond that I think there are major questions about how relevant late infection (glandular fever) is to any links to serious disease (which looks a bit muddled here).

I have not read beyond the abstract but I suspect the medical analysis here may be pretty dodgy.

No this was just the normal gene expression profiles documenting functional subsets of neurons. It is amazingly complicated and well documented. There are muscle specific nociceptors if I remember rightly, along with all the different sensory modalities from pain to vibration sense etc.

Yes, my genetics friends showed me some amazing expression profiles for DRG cell populations. Vagal cells may link in to DRG but the 'vagus nerve' itself seems to me a pretty boring structure. Edit: actually AI says vagal cells do not go to DRG and that is what I thought I was taught!

I don't see any likelihood of finding cytokines around a nerve trunk. Before discussing the 'vagus nerve' I think we need to consider whether we are interested in sensory cells or motor cells or subsets of those or whatever. The vagus is just a bundle of fibres belonging to cells doing all sorts...

What constitutes 'legitimate'? Even in carefully controlled trials we have no idea whether the drug caused an improvement or worsening in an individual unless we have some objective pharmacodynamic data.

My impression was that someone saw a commercial opening for a commissioned service. The whole thing seemed to be an exercise in whitewashing.