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Interesting. Will this be a full-scale prevalence study like the ones Jason and the CDC did?

Here's a link to the article: https://www.meaction.net/2019/09/24/join-our-values-and-policy-initiative/ I think it looks alright but that there needs to be a focus on 'factfulness' and commitment to evidence-based medicine, both in the principles and core values. Would other forum S4ME...

What we would normally understand under risk of bias due to lack of blinding (the expectations, hopes and response bias of patients) is assessed at Domain 4: Risk of bias in measurement of the outcome, question 4.3 to 4.5. More info in this long post...

Thanks I'm going to link to your submitted comment, published on the other thread, in case some might have missed it: https://www.s4me.info/threads/bias-due-to-a-lack-of-blinding-a-discussion.11429/#post-203732

This was only for blinding though. For selective reporting, it seems that deviations from the protocol are taken less seriously in the new tool. In the old tool a trial had to follow the protocol in reporting the outcome. It reads: In the new tool, this is assessed at question 5.1. In the...

Could you give an example or do you mean that the more a tool tries to specify with rules how bias should be assessed, the more it gives the impression that no judgement is needed? I don't think anyone would disagree with that, it's just that they have chosen to use only 3 possible outcomes for...

I've mostly focused on the issue of blinding. On this aspect, the new tool is less bad than one would think after first reading the paper. I'll try to explain below: The old version Suppose that a trial did not blind patients or therapists and that it used subjective outcomes. In the old tool...

Sorry that it took so long for me to come back to this thread. The original tool is described in the Cochrane handbook, chapter 8, which is publically available. Here's a short overview: https://handbook-5-1.cochrane.org/chapter_8/table_8_5_d_criteria_for_judging_risk_of_bias_in_the_risk_of.htm...

Spot on.

This is a study from 2016

I'm not sure if the theory of the researchers of the Workwell Foundation on the aerobic energy system being damaged in ME/CFS is correct, but I think it's still useful to document their perspective given how different it is from how European researchers tend to approach the illness. The second...

Merged thread I saw this on Tom Kindlon's twitter page. The people who have made the documentary Voices from the Shadows are now working on another project called "Dialogues for a Neglected Illness" They have released two short video's: Understanding Graded Exercise Therapy for ME/CFS. Part One...

Gonna tag some people who might be interested in this discussion: @dave30th @strategist @Jonathan Edwards @Woolie @Esther12 @Caroline Struthers @Medfeb @Snow Leopard

The history of blinding One more thing I would like to share is this article that goes into the history of blinding (Jensen et al. 2016). It says that blinding only really took off after WOII (as did randomization) but that the principles were well understood centuries before that. The authors...

An unfair comparison I’m amazed by how little discussion this issue gets in the scientific literature. One person who has tried to raise the problem is Douglas Berger, an American psychiatrist working in Japan. He argued that it is unfair to compare antidepressants and CBT for the treatment of...

Trials with and without blinding A better way to study the effects of blinding is to look at trials that have two parts: one that is blinded and one that is not. Unfortunately, these are very rare. Hrobjartsson et al. did a review and only found 12. The average difference in effect size for...

Problems with the meta-analysis approach There are some problems with this method though. Trials in the same meta-analysis differ in many ways and these may obscure the effects of bias. It’s possible for example that unblinded trials have overall lower methodological quality and that other...

Meta-analyses The most common method to measure bias due to a lack of blinding in randomized controlled trials (RCT’s), is to look at meta-analyses. These provide an overview of RCT’s using the same treatment for the same type of patients. So if you have trials that are blinded and some that...

First some basics Blinding (sometimes called masking) refers to the process of keeping key persons involved in the conduct of a trial unaware of group assignment. So in the case of a blinded trial, patients, therapists, outcome assessors, etc. do not know who is getting the intervention and who...

I would like to use this thread for a discussion on the effects of a lack of blinding in randomized trials, something that frequently comes up in our discussions elsewhere on the forum. Ever since the new risk of bias (RoB 2) tool for Cochrane came out I’ve been trying to learn more about...