Nightingale Health and UK Biobank announces major initiative to analyse half a million blood samples to facilitate global medical research

This is the UK Biobank as opposed to the UK ME/CFS Biobank, looking at metabolic biomarkers of disease,

http://www.ukbiobank.ac.uk/2018/06/...amples-to-facilitate-global-medical-research/

 

Thankfully in the region of 2000 of these people have declared themselves to have CFS so we might get a breakdown. Wouldn’t have happened 35 years ago when few were diagnosed. It’s great to be able to piggyback on other projects.

 

@Samuel, yes, those are the exact names as far as I can see. I agree, it's slightly confusing.

 

"...measuring metabolic biomarkers that recent studies have found are predictive of future risk..."

Not sure these biomarkers in general and specifically are relevant to ME/CFS. Chronic disease is a disparate group, arguably connected often through the word "chronic" only.

Moreover, these are predictors of FUTURE risk?

 

Yes, this is the main direction of UK Biobank - predicting future ill health. Which makes it not really geared to the sort of studies we might think useful in ME. There is also the issue that if you study a hundred diseases using metabolomics then your Bonferoni correction for p values goes up about another hundred fold. In other words you have an even bigger false positive problem.

That said, if all the samples are run on metabolomics then if there is anything consistently different in ME there is a reasonable chance it might turn up.

 

We are going to need to get used to this similarity because both organisations are now very relevant to what is happening in ME research. In fact the identification of 2000 people with probable ME in the UK Biobank cohort was, as I understand it, a result of a suggestion of how to identify people by the UK ME/CFS Biobank team. And it makes sense for anyone with an initial finding to replicate it with material from BOTH Biobanks if possible. We ought really to have about six Biobanks available for multiple comparisons.

 

I think this is a fair assumption, but not necessarily completely correct. An example, although not metabolic, might be body temp. Many pwME have low temps. Who even looks for this in major studies, at least as a rule? This should stick out, but it does not.

Just because we fall out of range, doesn't mean we fall into anyone's radar.