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Tissue was not tested but I wonder if a virus was there if it would not leave traces in the blood and elsewhere. As somebody noted: "The question is what these viruses can do while replicating at such a low frequency that they are not detected in the blood.

Some quotes from the paper: "At the initial visit, all adult patients met the CCC and all pediatric patients met the CDW-R and/or 404 CCC criteria as was required for ME/CFS diagnosis in this study. However, due to the absence of 405 pain (n=3) or neurocognitive manifestations (n=1), 4/12 (33%)...

Interesting editorial. When ME/CFS advocates argued that more funding should go to testing non-pharmacological interventions we were always accused of having a reductionist mind, biased against psychotherapy, blocking progress, etc. And anyone that mentioned that some seem to minimize ME/CFS...

Thanks @Simon M and @InitialConditions ! I agree the PHQ-2 seems the least problematic, but it is only 2 questions and was mainly intended as a first screening tool. Frequently used questionnaires for depression such as the PHQ-9 and Beck Depression Inventory focus a lot on somatic...

I think StackOverflow's took the right position. In my view, Chat GTP is very useful if you use it as a language model to help generate text or easy code, but not for things that require a deeper understanding or logic. I heard someone make the analogy with self-driving cars. The technology...

Many questionnaires used to measure depression ask about general symptoms such as fatigue, sleep, appetite, concentration etc. People with a chronic illness such as ME/CFS already have those symptoms and are thus more likely to score high on these depression questionnaires, even if they are not...

Interesting study. They did some simple cognitive tests before and after a 10-minute NASA lean test. The ME/CFS and Long Covid patients did worse before the lean test than controls. They also got worse after the lean test while the healthy controls did better than before. The main results are in...

But frustrating that the ME/CFS community has been trying to get accurate info in the newspapers about problems in ME/CFS healthcare or interesting research studies while being ignored by editors. But when there is a US group doing experiments without ethical approval, it is suddenly fine to...

Why did The Observer/Guardian publish this article? It does not mention the research on gut dysbiosis by Carding in the UK or the comeback study on FMT in Norway. It almost reads like an ad for Remission Biome.

Here's an example: fatigue assessed in the Rituximab trial was not downgraded (page 36 of Appendix F). The quality of evidence was considered high.

Many of the arguments are the same as in the Lancet commentary. Here's a brief overview of my comments based on the arguments in the press release. 1. The 2021 guideline proposed a new definition of CFS/ME which required the presence of four symptoms. One of these was ‘post-exertional symptom...

Agree, she is really fluent and professional, job well done. The other presenters were also good.The first one talked about restless leg syndrome, the last one about chronic pain.

Thanks for pointing that out. I've made an error by only looking at some papers with results after treatment where the SD is often larger than at baseline. In this Long Covid trial it also increases from 3.7 to 12 (the figure they used for the power calculation). This increase in SD might point...

Unfortunate that nobody touched on the strange numbers in table 3. They report for example a standard error of 0.5 in the CBT-group at baseline. Because the sample size was 57, the standard deviation would be: 0.5 * sqrt(57) = 3.77. This is extremely small. The mean was 47! In other papers...

They used the flawed Wessely review to argue that placebo effects in ME/CFS are small. The effect for the primary outcome fatigue is quite large (Cohen's d of 0.69) while the effect for physical fatigue was probably not clinically significant (Cohen's d of 0.3).

Just watched the fictional TV-show 'Dopesick' and the HBO-documentary 'The Crime of the Century'. Both are about the opioid crisis in the US. They tell the story of how in the 1990s a pharmaceutical company 'Purdue Pharma' started marketing their opoid painkiller OxyContin to regular pain...

It is unfortunate that mental illness and stress as a cause of symptoms carry so much stigma. This should not happen, but it does. So if journalists write that illness X is likely caused by mental illness/stress while the evidence is very weak, this will likely be harmful for patients with...

Moved posts This is the MS paper in question: Locus for severity implicates CNS resilience in progression of multiple sclerosis | Nature Unfortunately, I do not have access to it. Does anyone have an effect size or p-value for the association because they don't seem to report any in the abstract.

I think her main argument is that there is too much resistance to mental illness having a causal role in Long Covid because this could actually be the case. But she admits that at present there is no strong evidence for this. So when there is strong evidence there will likely be few resistance...

She wrote: "Pieces by mainstream journalists have suggested that linking depression and long COVID is tantamount to accusing all long COVID sufferers of being malingerers." She references articles by David Tuller and Ed Young which do not really say this. They interviewed patients who have been...