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The abstract writes: "34 participants aged 13–18 years (25 ME/CFS, 23 controls)" Which is probably an error. 48 patients were invited to participate but 10 could not be contacted and 4 withdrew which gives 34 participants (17 with ME/CFS and 17 healthy controls).

Strange that none of the variables measured (fatigue, sleep quality, pain, depression and anxiety, quality of life) predicted having ME/CFS at follow-up.

On Twitter, many interpret this study as showing a difference between Fukuda and ICC criteria but this would require a direct comparison between these groups, which isn't reported.

The authors write: Shouldn't the 1 be turned into a 2 because they looked for differences in the Fukud and ICC group separately?

Sounds interesting but there seems to be quite a lot of degrees of freedom of how the authors could have influenced the results of their statistical tests. The sample size and the decision to test for Fukuda and ICC group separately weren't pre-specified. The latter is a bit strange because...

The original study also speaks of "post-exertional fatigue" rather than PEM. Activin B is a novel biomarker for chronic fatigue syndrome/myalgic encephalomyelitis (CFS/ME) diagnosis: a cross sectional study (biomedcentral.com) I think it is sometimes underestimated how few studies correctly...

Good that this replication study received support from the Latvian government. The study notes:

Not sure if this would explain the difference between studies. The authors discuss this point as follows: Here's the main data. Seems like there are lots of participants that are close to the quantification limit.

The main argument for the role of enteroviruses in ME are the past epidemics where such a connection was hypothesized. But those do not seem to appear anymore and instead millions of patients got ill outside recognized epidemics, without clear seasonality etc. I haven't found a discussion on why...

Patients in Belgium and the Netherlands created this artwork for severe ME day

I'm not from the UK haven't been involved in any preparation for the final NICE guideline release but I do hope that UK patient organizations are preparing for the ensuing debate in the media. I hope they are contacting scientists like Brian Hughes, David Tuller, Jonathan Edwards, Caroline...

Perhaps I should submit the following, sarcastic letter Dear Sir/Madam, We read with great interest the manuscript by Hall et al. on strategies for patients with medically unexplained symptoms (MUS) to avoid therapeutic nihilism in their healthcare providers. Based on our experience, however...

Some quotes from the article: "Learning positive ways to assist patients avoids professionals collapsing into therapeutic nihilism" "By learning from people who have transcended, at least in part, some of the suffering induced by their symptom(s), clinicians can develop skills and avoid the...

It might be good to ask for patient representatives to be involved in the making of this guideline. You could refer to NICE or the Dutch guideline as examples of this. Patient representatives can point out flaws or potential problems more rapidly when the report is still being written, which...

The lobbying gives the impression that people with conflicts of interest (COI) are trying to influence the process. ME/CFS charities likely want to have their say in this process but in most cases, they exist solely to represent the general interest of patients. They can be incompetent and...

They did. But, as you pointed out, their trial was also blinded, which makes the use of subjective outcomes not a big problem.

I'm not very surprised that some committee members stepped down given the background of some. Hans Knoop did the same just before the Dutch guidelines were published. It seems that other BPS proponents such as Burton, Stanton, and Daniels have not stepped down. This might indicate disagreement.

Although the authors seem to report this correctly, I think it might be worth highlighting their conflict of interest: The second author is an employee at VITAE Health Innovation, a company that sells supplements like the ones tested in the trial. The company provided the supplements and...

Here's a summary of issues I found with this paper: 1) Between-group differences The authors base their conclusion on significance tests comparing a baseline with a final measurement separately in each group. Bland & Altman described this approach as “conceptually wrong, statistically invalid...