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Would that theory require the patient to show sensitivity to MSG?

My guess is that some PWME would be able to do a bit more activity without suffering PEM, others would trigger PEM from the extra cognitive/emotional factors resulting from walking further (seeing new things, interacting with people), others might trigger PEM from the extra cognitive effort of...

It's a tool, and just like all other tools, has potential to be useful and potential to be harmful. It's not a case of "all animal testing is useless and pointless cruelty" vs "animal testing should be expanded as much as possible". Some animal testing has little potential for value, while has...

Nothing at all? I was under the impression that knockout mice (and other creatures) are an important tool for understanding what specific genes do. While there might not be all that many cases where animal testing directly produced an important treatment for humans, I expect there were many...

I've been reading a book (10% human) about our microbiome, which suggests that changes to our microbiomes are responsible for the rise in allergies. That approach might lead to a cure for allergies, which would be less profitable than this fancy vaccination approach.

Isn't correct knowledge better than ignorance? Knowing how the immune cells work is rather important. If there's no other reasonable option, a bit of animal cruelty might be a lesser evil than letting people suffer needlessly due to a lack of treatment due to lack of knowledge. Is thymus...

Hmmm, not convinced this is a major discovery about cancer. Most cancer cells aren't physically squeezed, so this wouldn't play a role in typical cancer. It might be an important discovery for other aspects of biology.

I think that approach would be more likely to result in something helpful. Studying the symptoms isn't useless, since it could lead to better subgrouping that could reduce noise in studies. It could also lead to treatments for a symptom, although I'd rather see effort made to prevent PEM...

Maybe people who have filled out or at least read the questionnaire should fill out a survey of how they rate the quality of the survey, and the problems with it, and send DePaul the results.

"Antidepressants may be considered for fatigue even without depression " It seems like they're likely to be prescribed for nearly any complaint.

That's what caught my attention in that study too. My brainfog doesn't seem to cause memory problems. I haven't properly tested my ability to learn during brainfog vs no brainfog, but haven't noticed any dramatic difference. I doubt that they have a deep understanding of what AMPAR does, so...

Are they claiming that this immunosenescence also occurs in young people? Does immunosenescense abruptly switch off and then back on again? To me it looks like a theory that seems okay only if you limit which cases of ME you study.

There are things that could be done to improve PRO inclusions, such as reporting what % of participants fully filled out the questionnaire. A low number might indicate selection bias (or fatalities, or "too sick to fill out a form"). Whichever improvements are in the guidelines, the problem...

I wouldn't be surprised that sick, inactive people have different microbiomes than healthy, active ones. I expect there will be a bunch of papers finding correlations between microbiome compositions and various factors that are due to lifestyle or personality types. I'm sure someone could find...

Good example of how using PROs can cause harm. A scalpel can provide benefits, or cause harm. Writing up some guidelines for safe scalpel use isn't going to prevent someone from committing a brutal murder with one. It's just an excuse for self-back-patting from the committee creating the...

Yes, but the important part is how well the study is done. Subjective outcomes are dependent on how the questions are worded and various other factors that could easily bias the results. PROs can provide valuable information, but they can also provide harmful garbage. I think it unlikely that...

They can possibly provide crucial information. I can imagine scenarios where that's true. If 95% of patients report vomiting after 3 days on a drug, that's valuable data. However, that's for easily verifiable outcomes. When it's for non-verifiable outcomes ("feeling better"), it's just...

They should check to see how often the decision to include PROs was made at the start of the study, rather than after, when it was known whether it would make the results look better or worse. As rvallee pointed out, the value of PROs is questionable and inconsistent. How positive the patients...

That's why I think it's more likely an unknown factor of the setup. I think this sort of "discovery" is common when you push new technology beyond its known limits. Maybe the nanoneedles react to something in serum that is processed in a way that is subtly different between subjects and...

Definitely, even if it's just to better understand flaws in the measurement process that led to a misleading difference. You have to identify instrumentation error before you can eliminate it. In this sort of situation, I depend on the researchers to judge the strength of the finding. Are...