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My thoughts as a lay person: 1) The relevance of symptoms for making a diagnosis is different from the relevance of symptoms for measuring a treatment effect, especially in the context of clinical trials. When patients inform their doctors about symptoms that are not only unpleasant but...

As the title indicates. Proponents of therapist delivered treatments like psychotherapy or exercise repeatedly rejected the argument that relying solely on subjective outcomes in open label trials to assess the effectiveness of said treatments was a bad idea. In their criticism on the NICE...

I thought it could be worthwhile to have a closer look at a particular claim of some defenders of research on the Lightning Process and similarly badly designed intervention studies -- the claim that there is a general shift to use patient reported outcomes (PROs) in "areas with a tradition of...

Anker, S D, Agewall, S, Borggrefe M et al, 2014, The importance of patient-reported outcomes: a call for their comprehensive integration in cardiovascular clinical trials, European Heart Journal, Volume 35, Issue 30, 7 August 2014, Pages 2001–2009, https://doi.org/10.1093/eurheartj/ehu205...

So, only one example for this double cherry-picking for now. The review authors state: "Mediation analysis of CBT for CFS has revealed that changes in both beliefs and behaviours can mediate the effects of CBT." The references for that statement are Chalder 2015; Wiborg 2011; Wiborg 2012. I...

One last addition to the first point -- how the review authors use references to justify their own past and future research. It appears to be a kind of double cherry-picking. They do not only cherry-pick references but the references themselves are made of cherry-picking and a failure to...

3.) More a question: That’s how the review authors deal with the impossibility to blind patients and treatment providers to the intervention: "Blinding of outcome assessment (checking for detection bias): "This is usually assessed by looking at the methods used to blind study participants...

2.) The review authors acknowledge that the evidence from the current state of research is too uncertain to conclude anything about the effectiveness of "psychosocial" interventions in incurable cancer. It's unclear however, why they did a meta-analysis at all. The reasons they give for...

That's what I thought, too. Added to my previous post: The review authors weren't involved in any of the studies considered for the actual meta-analysis. (They only co-wrote some other papers with some of the studies' authors.) However, they justify the need of further research in this area...

I thought this was an interesting study 'nevertheless'. Carson et al (2015): "The total symptom count was greater for patients with symptoms unexplained by disease regardless of which combination of symptoms was included in the count (table 2). "However, there was substantial overlap in the...

Carson AJ, Stone J, Hansen CH, et al, Somatic symptom count scores do not identify patients with symptoms unexplained by disease: a prospective cohort study of neurology outpatients Journal of Neurology, Neurosurgery & Psychiatry 2015;86:295-301...

The review authors mention two relevant ongoing studies: "We identified two studies that have not been completed (Poort; Serfaty)" See Characteristics of ongoing studies table. Five of the review authors (among them Knoop and Bleijenberg ) were investigators of one of these two ongoing...

I guess they would reply you should look at all the research that supports the potential effectiveness -- research that they've done themselves or by colleagues they are strongly affiliated with. It's problematic that Cochrane invites authors to do a systematic reviews in a research area where...

:thumbup: :laugh: That thread had consisted of more than 800 posts even before Jonathan added some advice for the authors of the Lancet piece. I couldn't find anything in the threads' first posts that could serve as evidence for what they claim the reference was, but didn't read through the...

Don't know when I will have the capacities to write more why I think this Cochrane Review, even though from 2017, deserved a comment. Here's point No. 1: I think this review is a good example of how authors who state that "research has provided empirical support for the efficacy of...

From the section "How the intervention might work": "Although research has provided empirical support for the efficacy of psychosocial interventions for fatigue (irrespective of the presence of a medical condition), knowledge about the therapeutic mechanisms of these interventions is lacking...

There's nothing added on the withdrawn protocol's page indicating a planned update. But this was only on exercise, not on CBT. So there seem to be two reviews in the making, but not sure if they're still being edited by Cochrane. However, I realized only now that Knoop is also a Cochrane...

Psychosocial interventions for fatigue during cancer treatment with palliative intent (Cochrane Review), 2017 Hanneke Poort, Marlies Peters, Gijs Bleijenberg, Marieke FM Gielissen, Martine Margaretha Goedendorp, Paul Jacobsen, Stans Verhagen, Hans Knoop...

Not ME or MUS related, but some maybe interesting interaction on PubPeer following criticism of biomedical research: https://twitter.com/microbiomdigest/status/1356722780826386433 Perhaps worthwhile to keep putting criticism on all sort of badly designed ME and MUS research on that platform...

From Flottorp's et al Lancet comment on the new NICE guideline: Edit: KGB = Kjetil G Brurberg HK = Hans Knoop