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This paper is certainly puzzling. Leighton Barnden has generally been regarded as a decent investigator in the field of brain imaging. Some of his previous work in ME/CFS has been focussed on the brainstem. The work of Sonya Marshall-Gradisnik (co-leader of NCNED) has been criticised on the...

I thought that commentary by Dr Elke Hausmann on the book Invisible Illness was excellent and well worth a read. Skimming this thread, it looks as if there are two issues: 1. Mendenhall suffering censorship by Wessely for a journal article that criticised him (and PACE?), and 2. Mendenhall...

Measurements before and 1 day after CPET/exercise might provide an approximation to PEM. There have been some studies that have measured molecules in the blood before and after exercise. I can't recall one that measured cortisol but possibly some have. Another sort of study would be 'good...

I'd just like to encourage more detailed family genetics studies, where there are multiple family members with ME/CFS diagnoses, as a half way house between n=1 and big studies. There can be an element of prediction in those, so they provide more reliable evidence that a variant (or...

Before I address that last post of @jnmaciuch's I think I need to defend myself or at least explain why I'm banging on about these things. It's not out of pettiness or some personal need to be right. I want my son to have a chance of living without the constraints of this disease, I want the...

Actually, I'm not really sure why the DG(36:2) feature was chosen for the PCA. The text says that it is the most elevated lipid. Looking at Table S5, DG(36:2) has a Q value (adjusted p) of 0.4 (not significant) and even its unadjusted p value is only 0.03. Fold change, which is a measure of...

I really don't want to be harsh and I agree a scatter plot would look similar. But the purposes of the two analyses are completely different and the axes labels make all the difference. With a scatter plot, it is clear that you have selected one or two features to plot. You might have...

That makes sense. The problem is that there is a blue line and big blue text on Figure 1A indicating that three pathways are significantly affected. Here are the p values and FDR from S2: After correction for multiple comparisons, the p value for steroid hormone biosynthesis is 0.551...

PCA Honestly, I'm a bit flabbergasted. After going to all that effort to highlight the problem with the use of a PCA in the Tate paper, one of my favourite ME/CFS scientists is aware of that and still commits even worse PCA abuse.... I don't understand why you would choose to do a PCA in this...

Hopefully I haven't posted this one already:

Lipidome analysis There were 454 lipids detected. The dataset was adjusted for multiple comparisons. Only one lipid was found to be significantly reduced in the ME/CFS samples compared to the controls, that's the PC(O-38:4). This is Figure 3. Figure 3A shows the remarkable separation of the...

Thanks @DMissa. To be clear, I'm impressed with lots of things about this paper so far and I very much appreciate the transparency and readability of the paper and you being here to discuss it. I'm not suggesting you have aimed to misrepresent data, I know you wouldn't do that. I chose the wrong...

Here's Figure 1A. The caption and the text are quite clear that the things driving the selection of the three 'potentially dysregulated pathways' are each of the three features (ie one feature driving one pathway). The Steroid hormones biosynthesis datapoint is barely significant (I think...

I'm only part of the way through the paper, but already there is a lot to like. Thanks to @DMissa and team for listening to us and no doubt to others, and thanks for the careful work. I agree with Trish that the paper is the better for not spending time in the introduction detailing what...

Ethics approval should consider issues that go well beyond participants' privacy. An underpowered study that could be vulnerable to selection bias and that is focussed on a gene popularly understood to be 'the warrior: worrier gene' could easily have some very significant ethical problems...

Welcome to the forum @Rachelsmallfry. Good on you for bringing your expertise to the ME/CFS question and thank you for joining the forum. Can you tell us who your supervisor is please? If you feel willing to share who your specialist is too, that would be great. I've added a COMT tag to this...

On hydrocortisone treatment, this is a copy of a post I made on another thread: I can't recall having steroids since developing ME/CFS.

I'm very sorry @Formerhuman that you have felt concerned when participating. I can remember coming across the idea of POTS about a year after my family became ill with ME/CFS and thinking it was helpful. I told a doctor about it, who was unimpressed. I tracked my heart rate, and I became...

I assume documents about decisions on the type of patient deemed unacceptable for government funded clinics and the type of research deemed not worth pursuing by government funded research institutions could be obtained through Freedom of Information processes? I'm just not sure how far they...

For sure, the core problem is not that people come to doctors with incorrect beliefs about their illness. The core problem is that doctors generally, like everyone but probably often especially so, want to feel competent and appreciated. Illnesses where the pathology is not understood and for...