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(Note that this is an old study from 2004) Abstract Context: There is no established pharmacological treatment for the core symptoms of chronic fatigue syndrome (CFS). Galantamine hydrobromide, an acetyl cholesterone inhibitor, has pharmacological properties that might benefit patients with...

It seems that this trial by Cleare and Wessely on hydrocortisone reported in the Lancet was excluded (I suppose because the treatment duration of 1 month was too short) Cleare AJ, Heap E, Malhi GS, et al. Low-dose hydrocortisone in chronic fatigue syndrome: a randomised crossover trial. Lancet...

Thanks. I think it is sometimes underestimated how influential this Dutch group has been. They have for example published by far the most trials on ME/CFS. I also think they were more radical than Sharpe or Wessely: patients were encouraged to no longer see themselves as CFS patients. One...

They did include the following study: Stubhaug B, Lie SA, Ursin H, et al. Cognitive-behavioural therapy v. mirtazapine for chronic fatigue and neurasthenia: randomised placebo-controlled trial. Br J Psychiatry. 2008;192(3):217-23. doi: 10.1192/bjp.bp.106.031815. PMID: 18310583 This is weird...

There are a couple of non-randomized studies that showed that employment/hours worked do not increase after CBT. My personal impression is that a lot of doctors and policymakers think that CBT is an evidence-based rehabilitation and therefore it must be good to get patients back to work. It's...

The report mentions both the PACE authors' post-hoc definition of recovery and the one they had specified in the protocol. Unfortunately, they used the former in their meta-analyses. For example here:

It seems that the big CBT trial by Prins et al. (published in 2001 in The Lancet) was excluded because it didn't use the Fukuda criteria correctly. The report says: Prins JB, Bleijenberg G, Bazelmans E, et al. Cognitive behaviour therapy for chronic fatigue syndrome: a multicentre randomised...

Just noticed that Peter Gladwell was also part of this trial on CBT for ME/CFS. The trial report states "The decision was taken to include structured exercise within the CBT group." Cognitive behavioural therapy in chronic fatigue syndrome: a randomised controlled trial of an outpatient group...

The results are actually very clear that the intervention didn't work. the confidence interval for the primary outcome, WSAS measured at 52 weeks had a 95% confidence interval of −3.44 to 0.48. It excludes what the authors themselves have defined as the minimum clinically important difference...

The authors themselves have defined a minimum clinically important difference for the WSAS at 3.6 points. So 1.5 isn't even close. They measured the WSAS at 9 weeks (difference of 0.19), at 20 weeks (difference of 2.41), at 40 weeks (difference of 1.32), and at 52 weeks (difference of 1.48). At...

It seems that Henegan has been quite controversial because of his statements about COVID_19.

Made a similar thread last year: Biomedical research findings in ME/CFS that were replicated by multiple groups - discussion thread | Science for ME (s4me.info)

Waw, this is really a textbook example of how to misrepresent results: highlight a couple in a long list of secondary outcomes that reached statistical significance, even although differences were very minor and not clinically significant. Also: this study had an A versus A + B design. Patients...

Going through the report, I noticed that it says in the discussion section (page 157 in the pdf): So the strength of evidence, for GET and CBT was rated as low, even when the comparison was inactive therapies. It might be good to ask them to describe this in the abstract. Currently, the...

It may be used by some but I think there is no good justification for this. It is not hard to see why a waiting list control is highly problematic. A child could understand it. So if the field finds this acceptable, then psychological research would simply be unacceptable. I really think...

This is disappointing: But this is more interesting:

In my view, he focuses too much on diagnostic criteria, rather than methodological weaknesses of the trial. That might have given journalists the impression that it works for some.

I was thinking about a comment under the actual paper on Frontiers in Psychiatry. Would this be worth contacting the editors for? People who only read the abstract get quite a misleading message.

Joan also refers to this interesting paper by Raphael et al. which probably provides the most reliable info we have on this subject. The abstract reads:

Thanks @Joan Crawford Some interesting highlights: