Interventions to treat pain in paediatric CFS/ME: a systematic review - Crawley et al Jan 2020

https://bmjpaedsopen.bmj.com/content/4/1/e000617

full paper pdf:
https://bmjpaedsopen.bmj.com/content/bmjpo/4/1/e000617.full.pdf

"However, patients who recover appear to have less pain than those who do not recover."

 

Another paper for the sake of writing a paper.

 

Hmm, I wonder why that might be? Possibly the clue is in the word "recover"? But no, obviously I'm wrong and catastrophising...

 

Follow up with ACT proposals?
This is preparing the way.

 

For what it is worth. There didn't seem to be anything exciting on a quick skim.

Previous versions
https://bmjpaedsopen.bmj.com/content/bmjpo/4/1/e000617.draft-revisions.pdf
PEER REVIEW HISTORY
https://bmjpaedsopen.bmj.com/content/bmjpo/4/1/e000617.reviewer-comments.pdf

 

I get the impression from reading the peer review comments that it is limited to a quick skim on style and not much more. It's more friendly and deferential than anything.

Jo Nijs appears to be a like-minded peer of Crawley: https://www.semanticscholar.org/author/Jo-Nijs/84058062.

So does David Vickers: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/books/NBK53585/.

Mutual self-admiration society. Why bother with actual peer review when you can just pretend that it is? Just have your friends and colleagues "review" your work, they already have their gold star stamp wet and ready to go. Let's dispense with all the extra work needed to validate things and agree with one another.

This is completely broken. Probably one more thing to ultimately get lost in the void but whatever I think it explains a lot of what's happening, @dave30th.

 

Looks like they rate the SMILE trial as just having a moderate risk of bias.

They say "One was deemed low risk of bias and one was deemed moderate risk of bias. The remaining two were at high risk of bias following assessment."

I've forgotten the details of the RoB discussion now, but thought this could be of interest to others (@Michiel Tack)



I vaguely remember thinking that RoB 2 meant that a trial was rated at a high risk of bias even if just one aspect of it was rated as having a high risk of bias?

Sounds like the FITNET data was rated as having a high-risk of bias: "The ROBINS-I tool suggested the longitudinal cohort study following an RCT was at high risk of bias."

 

I'll take a look. soon I can get back to some regular blogging I think. it feels like everything publicly discussed has to involve coronavirus at the moment.