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The autoimmune diseases of AIR are chronic - lifelong. TB, if untreated is chronic, or at least until it leads to death. Some treatments are aimed at primary causes, others at secondary pathway branches, so that is all very variable.

I don't think so. All a Cochrane review does is assess the quality of information in the public domain. when I did a Cochrane review patient consent was not an issue.

Different clinical presentations, yes. I probably wouldn't call them different diseases. The TB bacillus can produce renal abscess, pneumonia, meningitis and all sorts. A defect in the AIR gene can lead to a range of different autoimmune states.

I may be wrong but it seems like a complete waste of space. They took people who said they found exercise exhausting and they found exercise exhausting - isn't that it? I was amused by the title though. Made me think: 'What's your psychological response to this 'ere cross over exercise lad...

So we know that the project was successfully blocked by internal vested interests. It is time somebody high up resigned. Gill Leng was on the governing board of Cochrane during this period. Why did she not blow the whistle?

I think the idea of a persistent 'danger' response is quite plausible. However, all Naviaux seems to have produced is a mish-mash of speculation that provides no actual explanation for why anything persists. And there are no data whatever to support anything. It is hard to take seriously an...

I suspect we are all struggling with this one!!

Yes. Maybe I should have added to my last sentence: The amazing thing is that when it does, it does it better than you could have ever imagined it could, but through specific mechanisms completely different from what you had initially expected.

That does not give much information on what exactly they plan to do. If EBV drove multiple auto reactive responses you would expect that to produce a whole range of different illnesses, not one. If it facilitated one particular error (as maybe it does in MS) then we don't seem to have much of a...

Would someone keen to win an X Prize be likely to be sharp and intellectually honest? For me the satisfaction of science was discovering that something works the way you thought it might. The amazing thing is that when it does, it does it better than you could have ever imagined it could. The...

Pretty much none, I suspect. I think the 'influence' remains locked in to a group of no more than a dozen people, many of whose names appear on the 'Anomalies' paper. This is what Cochrane was set up for - to protect low tech therapies that could be managed from primary care, even if they don't...

When I say starter pathway I do not necessarily mean that would be early in the disease course in time terms. This is very complicated to explain but I think the answer to all your questions might be that the casual pathways of ME/CFS may, like rheumatoid arthritis, involve something like fifty...

That is how I had understood it, but if the guy was a psychiatrist isn't it likely that this was always a clever psychospeak rigmarole for making a psychologising agenda plausible and fundable? It is typical of the psychosocial/liaison psychiatry lobby to sound terribly plausible about these...

They might be now.

It is so disappointing to see such embarrassingly banal and ill-informed comments coming both from Attomarker and from Imperial College. The idea that you can treat low antibody levels with 'immunotherapy' is just garbage. As if someone has had a quick read through an immunology book on the train.

Yes but this is measuring antibody levels I think. Antibodies in the blood are what provide protection because they diffuse out into all tissues except brain.

As presented the whole thing looks like a bad entry for a school invention competition. The presentation might be misleading but I am not optimistic. It looks as if the patients were divided into three groups. One third had more antibodies than the others. One third had less than the others and...

Yes, I doubt that would be directly relevant to ME/CFS but there might be a lesson in there somewhere.

Give it all to Chris and Audrey in Edinburgh I would say. The only thing that really matters is that you have sharp, intellectually honest, investigators. Actually, yes, there are some other friends who obviously come to mind, but Chris could share it out a bit.

In the absence of any findings with more robust markers I find it hard to be excited by a few chemokines, which are usually pretty uninterpretable. There is no such thing as endothelial inflammation so I am overall sceptical.