2024 Stanford MECFS meeting

[Trish]

Younger says some good basic research will come out soon. I suspect his mention of subgroups is a way of saying that this research is not very consistent across research groups!

Hmm. My immediate response to reading this was that it's a problem if the subgroup you belong to is determined by which research group analysed your sample! I guess that's not what he meant.

 

[forestglip]

Hmm. My immediate response to reading this was that it's a problem if the subgroup you belong to is determined by which research group analysed your sample! I guess that's not what he meant.

Quotes from the video about subgroups:

"It's really even more clear to me that there are probably ME/CFS subgroups. I think I see these different laboratories showing different really interesting things and in different pathologies, and it just makes me think that they are identifying different ME/CFS subgroups with different things wrong with them that are probably going to need different treatments."

"We need to figure out I think what are the critical subgroups because again I think they're going to need different treatments and I think a lot of studies, particularly clinical trials, ignored the subgroups and I think that's always been a problem."

"If you run a clinical trial, if you're testing a treatment and you just give it to all the people who meet ME/CFS criteria, that clinical trial has a really good chance of failing if there are actually subgroups."

"If there's actually subgroups and maybe only 25% of the ME/CFS participants are in that subgroup and only 25% would therefore respond to this treatment, that treatment may be great for the 25% but the clinical trial will still fail and the treatment will be rejected."

"We really have to work on identifying those subgroups in advance so we only give the drugs to the people who are most likely to respond to it."

 

[Jonathan Edwards]

Different findings in different laboratories only suggest subgroups if those findings are incompatible with each other in terms of mechanism. I am not sure I have seen any such incompatibility. And the most likely reason for different labs finding different things that are incompatible is that none of the findings are solid.

Suggesting subgroups is a popular way to explain away inconsistencies. There may well be subgroups but unless Younger can say something more specific this looks like wishful thinking to me.