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From the snippets: A slight concern when there is a substantial number of dropouts. Cortisol levels and ACTH levels - no difference between patients and controls In fact, ACTH and cortisol levels were slightly higher in the patients - not the reduced levels that we are so often told exist...

A member has asked us to have a look at this paper. I can only see the snippets Selection criteria: Description of what they did - tested ACTH and cortisol responses to an infusion of vasopressin. They note that this test is 'sensitive to fluctuations of CRH secretion within the...

2001 paper Several neuroendocrine studies have suggested hypoactivation of the hypothalamic-pituitary-adrenal axis in chronic fatigue syndrome. One possible determinant of this neuroendocrine abnormality, as well as the primary symptom of fatigue, is reduced hypothalamic secretion of...

Thanks so much for this important information @hibiscuswahine. Patient charities need to have this information so people can be well-advised.

Here's an article about pre-mastication (chewing food before giving it to infants) - link. It reminds me that we know nothing about the incidence of ME/CFS (and ages of onset) in communities that continue with older ways of living, including pre-mastication.

Most insects produce lots of offspring after one mating, and don't contribute much to the survival chances of the offspring once the eggs have hatched. Human mothers and fathers (and even grandparents) are typically important to the survival of their offspring and the communities that sustain...

Thanks for your careful work monitoring social media and compiling those statistics @Arfmeister. I note Trish's point as a moderator above about not copying posts from closed social media groups or discussing specifics but I think your thoughts on the following based on what you have seen on...

Thanks for @SNT Gatchaman linking this study with https://www.s4me.info/threads/transcriptional-control-of-complement-activation-in-an-exercise-model-of-cfs-2009-sorensen-et-al.22450/ That very small 2009 study found elevated levels of MASP2 in people with CFS, but only after exercise. It's...

Thank you to the research team for continuing to work on this and applying new advances to revisit the samples. I thought it looked like a carefully done study, with cases and controls well matched. But yes, the definition of long Covid seems very loose and early - one persisting symptom at 12...

I don't know. A more realistic hope is that Systrom and his team see it though - that team used the Central Sensitisation Inventory in the recent study linked upthread. I suspect we have members who were in the study or who know the researchers. Perhaps they will alert the team to the thread...

To the authors: A key problem with your inventory is that you have assumed a cause for a disparate collection of symptoms and experiences (or in the case of the childhood trauma, presumably you have assumed that it is causal of the symptoms). You have done this without evidence. A...

It's really disappointing to see this team using the nonsense that is the Central Sensitisation Inventory. It's nothing more than a questionnaire about symptoms that often occur in people diagnosed with things like ME/CFS and fibromyalgia (and actually that often occur in women). There's a...

Gosh, that must be quite some treatment to improve the CSI score on item 24. It would seem to involve time travel. What a hotchpotch of judgemental and harmful drivel. This is not science or medicine. A woman with an undiagnosed chronic UTI (and so often chronic UTIs are undiagnosed) is...

The comment critical of the paper is interesting. An excerpt:

I do think that the premise of the question that is the subject of the thread has to be up for debate. We think young people are more likely to recover, but just possibly they aren't. Perhaps they are more likely to be diagnosed early, in the period when recovery is more common in all ages...

A problem is that we don't actually have good data on what happens to people with ME/CFS during pregnancy. Certainly, not everyone improves during pregnancy. We absolutely need to have good data - pregnancy is a perfect natural experiment. I thought it was important enough to ask about it...

There are posts about the US withdrawal from WHO (and the state of California joining it as the first US state to do so) here: International: World Health Organisation News - news relevant to ME/CFS, Long Covid and related conditions

No, the problem of distinguishing between science and pseudoscience isn't taken for granted on the forum at all. Quite the opposite. The use of a word like pseudoscience without elaboration does not mean that the user doesn't accept that sometimes it might be hard to tell if something is...

I don't think that is true. If you have a good understanding of disease and treatments, a lot of the time you will be able to provide very useful help without knowing for sure exactly what the patient 'needs from their perspective and in their terms'. The proof of that is that doctors in an...

(cross post with the above post where the article excerpts say something similar about the epidemiology) I think it's an interesting puzzle to think about how this could be true without the cancer secreting something that reduces AD pathology. The incidence of AD is lower and diagnosed later...