Prevalence and predictors of long COVID among non-hospitalised adolescents and young adults: a prospective controlled cohort study, 2022, Wyller et al

I find Andrew Lloyd a completely perplexing person with his views on me/cfs. He is ok with putting his name on this study but has a thoroughly contrasting view in the interview below when explaining about psychosocial or vulnerability not being factors in the developments of me/cfs. He is clearly a smart man but it is as if he is being pulled by a mixture of his own views and bps researchers that have a more psychosomatic view. I don’t get it.
https://www.mja.com.au/podcast/212/...12-chronic-fatigue-syndrome-prof-andrew-lloyd
 
He is hopelessly lost, with no understanding of his subject matter. He gives muddled definitions of what CBT and GET are or are doing, even framing CBT as "graded exercise for the brain".

The interviewer asks him about the energy limitation he has described. From 22:25 (his emphasis) —

"In some ways the easiest notion about that question is in relation to traditional skeletal muscle aerobic exercise. What I would say in that regard is that it is unequivocally clear that muscle strength, endurance and recovery is absolutely normal in this condition — paradoxically."
Click to expand...

"When you really cut to the chase — you know I'm yelling at you to keep walking around the block or jogging or whatever, you can do it in this illness. The trick is we believe that the problem is more central, as in the brain — and it's more about the way the brain responds... perceives and responds... to those normal physiological messages from the body. It's like a misperception.

So we think of it as a central sensitisation disorder. In the brain - it has become overly sensitive to normal messages. That kind of notion underpins the graded exercise and brain training thing I was telling you about because it's what you could call a desensitisation paradigm — seems to work."
Click to expand...
 
To @Holinger's good point about the oddness of Lloyd suggesting that psychological factors aren't risks for onset:
Around 10:20 minute mark:
Interviewer: Do we know what causes CFS Andrew?
Lloyd: Yes, we know some things.

What we know is that the only recognised trigger for the onset, and part of the reason it's something that I have, ah an interest, a clinical and research interest in the disorder, is that it's infectious diseases, and what I mean by that, is a whole range of acute, predominantly viral, infections are well documented to be the trigger for the onset of the condition. There's a reasonably well known study that I conducted here in Australia called the Dubbo Infection Outcomes Study which identified that glandular fever, caused by Epstein-Barr virus; Ross River Fever, a mosquito-borne infection, causes rash and arthritis; and actually a bacterial infection called Q-fever, caught from cattle and sheep in particular, common in the bush, haha, those three, each of those three is actually a trigger for the onset of a subsequent, what we might call a post-infective fatigue syndrome. When we evaluate patients after six months of ongoing symptoms, about one in ten of the original group with the acute infection will still be crook with what would be diagnosed as a chronic fatigue syndrome or a post-infectious fatigue syndrome.
Interviewer: wow

Lloyd: As it turns out, turns out there's a range of other acute infections that are, not quite so systematically, but have been closely linked to the onset, so everything from influenza, to even leptospirosis is another, so there is a range of infections, and their, their commonality is that they all have a propensity to cause pretty severe, you know reasonably significant, acute illness. Not just a cough or a cold or a bit of gastro or something like that but more substantive acute infections.

Interviewer: I'm guessing it's too early to suggest a link between Covid and CFS?
Lloyd: Umm, I hate to say it haha, but it wouldn't surprise me because Covid falls into that category, at last in some patients, a pretty significant illness.
It plausibly will be.
Interviewer: Oh, gee
Lloyd: And so we need a prospective cohort study to tidy up and resolve whether that is indeed a significant outcome.

One other thing to say, Cate, about the triggers for onset, or the causative factors, is that, umm, there really isn't good systematic evidence to implicate anything else. There's a, especially amongst the lay community, there's sometimes a notion that people who are, how to describe this, 'psychologically vulnerable' you know, who have a predisposition to mood disorder genetically or from their family background. That's, in that Dubbo Study, not a risk factor for onset. Life stresses, you know, so if you are busy as hell at work, or you know you are bringing in the wheat crop for 24 hours a day for days on end, none of that is a risk factor for onset. Nothing else has been clearly implicated to be associated with the onset of the disorder.​

It's very odd, there was that 2019 study Lloyd did with Cvejic that tried to suggest that neuroticism was a factor for onset in the Dubbo study (even though the data didn't support the idea).
 
Last edited:
Holinger said:
I find Andrew Lloyd a completely perplexing person with his views on me/cfs. He is ok with putting his name on this study but has a thoroughly contrasting view in the interview below when explaining about psychosocial or vulnerability not being factors in the developments of me/cfs. He is clearly a smart man but it is as if he is being pulled by a mixture of his own views and bps researchers that have a more psychosomatic view. I don’t get it.
https://www.mja.com.au/podcast/212/...12-chronic-fatigue-syndrome-prof-andrew-lloyd
Click to expand...

He also makes multiple false and defamatory claims against patients including that their critiques are non-scientific and akin to climate change denial (at the very end of the interview). He also strongly endorses GET, CBT and cognitive remediation (a treatment for depression btw) in this interview and claims they improve functional capacity in ME/CFS, a claim for which there is 0 evidence.
 
When you really cut to the chase — you know I'm yelling at you to keep walking around the block or jogging or whatever, you can do it in this illness.
Click to expand...
and I'm yelling back - of course I've tried exercising my way out of this! It was the first thing I did. And it just consistently made things worse. And yes, for many of the 10 years I've had this illness, I've walked the dog each day, more than walking around the block. But, I'm still sick. As soon as I go over whatever my threshold is, I'm in a world of pain and exhaustion, sometimes for days.

It's the arrogance of it, when patients, when patient organisations, many clinicians are all saying 'no, exercise doesn't work'. Surely if it worked, there wouldn't be all the opposition - it's arrogant to assume that we are all so hopeless that we would rather stay sick for decades than just walk around the block a bit more.

And yes, there's no evidence for exercise even helping, let alone being curative, NICE couldn't find any evidence. What is the block in this man's mind that he can't see that? Other than, I suppose, a career of telling people that exercise works, a fatigue clinic associated with him that pushes that idea, a whole lot of friends that create a bubble of BPS thinking impervious to reality?

SNT Gatchaman said:
He gives muddled definitions of what CBT and GET are or are doing, even framing CBT as "graded exercise for the brain".
Click to expand...
I think he talks about graded exercise training and cognitive exercise training - the latter being "graded exercise for the brain" - so I think he sees the CET as different to CBT. He sees the GET and CET as 'desensitisation paradigms' - because the brain has somehow become too sensitive. He does talk about a package of CBT and GET as being just being management but then suggests that it will gradually improve function. So yes, it is muddled.

He talks about his efforts to educate allied health professionals about his CBT, GET programme - it works, but it's not curative, he says, there's plenty of room for improvement. He mentions that drugs that act on the brain that might help with the desensitisation programmes - I presume he means stimulants but he doesn't say, to modify the exacerbation of fatigue after exercise, 'to help us move forward with our desensitisation programmes more actively and efficiently'.

Another bit that was really bizarre and awful from about 28 minutes:
Lloyd: Perhaps the only other thing, it's a sort of sociopolitical comment.
Interviewer: Go for it
Lloyd: And that is, I think, for better or worse, I think we have to recognise that there is controversy and how the medical community responds. You probably know this, but it was a patient consumer group who lobbied the NHMRC to set up an expert advisory committee and then report to the CEO about what they, I think, rightly perceived as inadequate health service delivery and inadequate biomedical research for this condition in Australia, so that happened last year. And in response to that expert advisory committee, umm, the CEO has put out a targeted call for research, put forward some funds to support Australian research and has also prioritised some of those things that I mentioned like education, but also has prioritised a health economics study to understand how big a cost this is to the community. It would be fair to say though, in that process, it has become, if it wasn't already, pretty apparent that there are, umm, members of the consumer community that, umm, ah, feel not well looked after by the health services and are moving to rather alternative realms, and, as in non-evidence based treatments, and also are very actively critical, not necessarily in a rational sense, but are actively critical of some of the mainstream services and the research programmes. And so, for better or for worse, I think we have to recognise that that is part of the community's response. Something akin to climate change denial versus acceptance. So we have to recognise that and respond as well as we can to that as a scientific medical community.

It is with some satisfaction that I note that Lloyd's group didn't get any of the research funding that he mentioned was being distributed in 2020.
are moving to rather alternative realms, and, as in non-evidence based treatments, and also are very actively critical,
Click to expand...
Something akin to climate change denial versus acceptance.
Click to expand...
Hmm, maybe Professor Lloyd, people in glasshouses shouldn't throw stones?
(crossposted with Sid)
 
He is just wrong. Reductions in VO2 max have been found in the first CPET on ME patients and a subsequent reduction on the next day has been shown which is contrary to control behaviour that get mildly better results. So on the first exercise there is already indications on objective measures there is a problem, some 29% reduction in VO2 max. Then the soup of problems that appear the next day is really unique, there are far too many to list but its substantial set of differences on understood and not understood metabolic markers as well as immune and inflammatory, the differences are massive. So its not true to say they can just do the same as control if you tell people to run about they will underperform, then on subsequent days they clearly wont perform remotely as well.

I suspect if you keep pushing someone in this state eventually they will die.
 
Holinger said:
I find Andrew Lloyd a completely perplexing person with his views on me/cfs. He is ok with putting his name on this study but has a thoroughly contrasting view in the interview below when explaining about psychosocial or vulnerability not being factors in the developments of me/cfs. He is clearly a smart man but it is as if he is being pulled by a mixture of his own views and bps researchers that have a more psychosomatic view. I don’t get it.
https://www.mja.com.au/podcast/212/...12-chronic-fatigue-syndrome-prof-andrew-lloyd
Click to expand...
I think he just plays the audience and will flip-flop as the winds blow. As bad as Wessely, but they burned their reputation too hard for this. It's not as if he ever showed any knowledge of this, it's easy to be ambiguous when you aren't saying much.
 
SNT Gatchaman said:
Andrew Lloyd quoted yesterday in How “long covid” is shedding light on postviral syndromes - BMJ 21/9/22
Click to expand...
That's quite a helpful article, given it's in the BMJ. Lloyd though seems unreasonably certain about the cause.

While these diseases all have different acute symptoms, the symptoms associated with their post-infection syndromes tend to be remarkably similar: fatigue, neurological impairments, muscle and joint pain, sleep disturbances, and irritability are all common, says Andrew Lloyd, an infectious disease physician at the University of New South Wales in Sydney, Australia
Click to expand...
Annoying too that he, and some others, throw 'irritability' in there. How do you measure irritability exactly? If Professor Lloyd suddenly lost his career and capacity to earn income, and didn't have enough energy to do the things he wanted, and if people around him were suggesting he was just not trying hard enough to be better, and his doctors told him 'there's nothing wrong with you!', and if the media was suggesting 'these people are irritable', not to mention aggressive to the nice researchers trying to help them, then I wonder if he himself might occasionally be a little grumpy and frustrated. Branding that natural reaction as a core symptom seems like a great way to suggest that any anger we have can safely be ignored as the construct of unwell and unstable minds, a lot like 'oh, it must just be her time of the month'.
 
It's possible he's indicating "cerebral irritability", which can be seen following trauma, neurosurgery, seizures, meningo-encephalitis etc, really anything causing neuroinflammation I guess. I think you could suggest the auditory/visual hypersensitivities etc could be characterised as cerebral irritability. But he may mean the sort of common definition of irritability, such as in interpersonal interactions, in which case - yes, unhelpful, unreasonable and unfair.
 
BrightCandle said:
He is just wrong. Reductions in VO2 max have been found in the first CPET on ME patients and a subsequent reduction on the next day has been shown which is contrary to control behaviour that get mildly better results. So on the first exercise there is already indications on objective measures there is a problem, some 29% reduction in VO2 max. Then the soup of problems that appear the next day is really unique, there are far too many to list but its substantial set of differences on understood and not understood metabolic markers as well as immune and inflammatory, the differences are massive. So its not true to say they can just do the same as control if you tell people to run about they will underperform, then on subsequent days they clearly wont perform remotely as well.

I suspect if you keep pushing someone in this state eventually they will die.
Click to expand...

The crux of what we need to get across to everyone. But that is never well-written anywhere official in simple form. Love the phrase 'soup of problems'.

Just need to add in the 'soup of potential exerters' and that would be the penny-drop you dream of everyone 'getting' (along with how long that soup takes to ameliorate is a heck of a lot longer than they imagine when they think 'making you perform' is an example of OK rather than 'performing at harm to health' - which is why I want workwell to move to studying the PEM fully next and not just leave it where it is)
 
Hutan said:
and I'm yelling back - of course I've tried exercising my way out of this! It was the first thing I did. And it just consistently made things worse. And yes, for many of the 10 years I've had this illness, I've walked the dog each day, more than walking around the block. But, I'm still sick. As soon as I go over whatever my threshold is, I'm in a world of pain and exhaustion, sometimes for days.

It's the arrogance of it, when patients, when patient organisations, many clinicians are all saying 'no, exercise doesn't work'. Surely if it worked, there wouldn't be all the opposition - it's arrogant to assume that we are all so hopeless that we would rather stay sick for decades than just walk around the block a bit more.

And yes, there's no evidence for exercise even helping, let alone being curative, NICE couldn't find any evidence. What is the block in this man's mind that he can't see that? Other than, I suppose, a career of telling people that exercise works, a fatigue clinic associated with him that pushes that idea, a whole lot of friends that create a bubble of BPS thinking impervious to reality?


I think he talks about graded exercise training and cognitive exercise training - the latter being "graded exercise for the brain" - so I think he sees the CET as different to CBT. He sees the GET and CET as 'desensitisation paradigms' - because the brain has somehow become too sensitive. He does talk about a package of CBT and GET as being just being management but then suggests that it will gradually improve function. So yes, it is muddled.

He talks about his efforts to educate allied health professionals about his CBT, GET programme - it works, but it's not curative, he says, there's plenty of room for improvement. He mentions that drugs that act on the brain that might help with the desensitisation programmes - I presume he means stimulants but he doesn't say, to modify the exacerbation of fatigue after exercise, 'to help us move forward with our desensitisation programmes more actively and efficiently'.

Another bit that was really bizarre and awful from about 28 minutes:
Lloyd: Perhaps the only other thing, it's a sort of sociopolitical comment.
Interviewer: Go for it
Lloyd: And that is, I think, for better or worse, I think we have to recognise that there is controversy and how the medical community responds. You probably know this, but it was a patient consumer group who lobbied the NHMRC to set up an expert advisory committee and then report to the CEO about what they, I think, rightly perceived as inadequate health service delivery and inadequate biomedical research for this condition in Australia, so that happened last year. And in response to that expert advisory committee, umm, the CEO has put out a targeted call for research, put forward some funds to support Australian research and has also prioritised some of those things that I mentioned like education, but also has prioritised a health economics study to understand how big a cost this is to the community. It would be fair to say though, in that process, it has become, if it wasn't already, pretty apparent that there are, umm, members of the consumer community that, umm, ah, feel not well looked after by the health services and are moving to rather alternative realms, and, as in non-evidence based treatments, and also are very actively critical, not necessarily in a rational sense, but are actively critical of some of the mainstream services and the research programmes. And so, for better or for worse, I think we have to recognise that that is part of the community's response. Something akin to climate change denial versus acceptance. So we have to recognise that and respond as well as we can to that as a scientific medical community.

It is with some satisfaction that I note that Lloyd's group didn't get any of the research funding that he mentioned was being distributed in 2020.


Hmm, maybe Professor Lloyd, people in glasshouses shouldn't throw stones?
(crossposted with Sid)
Click to expand...

Glad you addressed this. Wind-up merchant idiot man. Disgusting. He should be accountable for his harm - there need to be processes for this, for him to still say such deluded nonsense SHOWS that without making him stare in the face what he has done, officially, he will not stop stating that something that causes harm is what people should be doing. And now it really is foreseeable and predictable so there really should be absolute room for prosecution to that effect just as if you caused the same level of harm and life destruction in any other manner - you can't incite people to harm themselves any other way, why this?

How you are allowed to keep a license when you refuse to read research about the advice you are 'yelling' lest it give you 'plausable deniability' because you ignored the patients who must have been harmed by you before when your job that you are paid to do claims to do no harm and be worthwhile to health and mental health - it breaks the logic of the profession. There is no get-out clause for utter chosen stupidity, ignorance and incompetence in this circumstance. Has he switched the definition/meaning of when he says 'get better' to be 'end up at deaths door forevermore unable to speak' and that is a new sophism trick?

It's like an experimenter blaming his lab rats for dying on him in response to a treatment and saying they are making him a victim from beyond their graves because poor him he will have to do some real work instead of regurgitating his same 'yells' about how dare they make it look like the treatment didn't work. I cannot 'get' the mindset. Those theoretical lab rats would have been signed off to be used on the basis that even if they did die information would be obtained that informed future safety and science - not that it would be ignored.

Where are his thousands of unconflicted cured people years on grateful to have their lives back to 'show not tell'? And why on earth does the health and the research relating to the health system not require that evidence of someone properly checking up on people independently to make sure it all actually isn't just 'transactional' but does care about and measure some genuine ongoing wellness level?
 
Last edited:
bobbler said:
How you are allowed to keep a license when you refuse to read research about the advice you are 'yelling'
Click to expand...
I have probably contributed to a misunderstanding about the 'yelling'. I started writing my response before I had heard the context of his 'yelling' comment. He was actually meaning, I think, 'if I yelled at a patient to move, if I really required them to move, they could. So, it's not that their body is incapable of moving. It's just that their mind is telling them not to.' He wasn't meaning 'I yell at my patients to move, for their own good, and they don't. The bastards just don't want to get better'. It was all part of his explanation that it's a central nervous system signalling problem.

But yes, he totally seems to miss the point that part of the reason we don't move sometimes is because if we do, we know we will be stuck in the hell of PEM for longer. And he misses the point that lots of us have tried ignoring the signals to lie down, and have pushed through, and it ends up very badly indeed. In my case, I think of my son who tried to attend a school he really wanted to be at, and played sport he really wanted to play, and ended up asleep for 20 hours a day and zombie-like for the remaining four hours a day, having to be helped to the toilet and otherwise bedridden, for a month, and only gradually coming back to his baseline over a year. I don't think, even with the strongest will in the world, he could have been awake much more or moved much more than he did. I know that, because I was the one trying to keep him awake long enough to get enough water and food into him to keep him alive, and it wasn't easy*. I suspect that shutting down is a very strong protective response, stopping more activity and giving the body time to get back to a healthier state.

I find the idea that Lloyd and his team want to experiment with stimulants to override that protective response very concerning.

*edit (With hindsight, my son should have been in a hospital on an IV-line, and I wonder why on earth I didn't get a doctor to see him, but I was sick and I had a daughter who was sick. By that time we had all lost confidence in doctors. We had strongly been given the message that doctors weren't interested or able to help. That time is just a blur of trying to get through it.)


bobbler said:
Where are his thousands of unconflicted cured people years on grateful to have their lives back to 'show not tell'?
Click to expand...
There was a video where Lloyd had a few graduates of his Fatigue Clinic give endorsements, and it was quite telling how they talked more about having learned to live with their symptoms, rather than being symptom-free. It's covered in a thread here somewhere I think. If not, it must be on PR. I was surprised that he couldn't find people to give more convincing endorsements, as I know, from the experience of seeing my daughter recover over two years (with no particular interventions) that there are people who recover naturally and who therefore could be convinced that a Fatigue Clinic was instrumental in that recovery.
 
Last edited:
Hutan said:
I have probably contributed to a misunderstanding about the 'yelling'. I started writing my response before I had heard the context of his 'yelling' comment. He was actually meaning, I think, 'if I yelled at a patient to move, if I really required them to move, they could. So, it's not that their body is incapable of moving. It's just that their mind is telling them not to.' He wasn't meaning 'I yell at my patients to move, for their own good, and they don't. The bastards just don't want to get better'. It was all part of his explanation that it's a central nervous system signalling problem.

But yes, he totally seems to miss the point that part of the reason we don't move sometimes is because if we do, we know we will be stuck in the hell of PEM for longer. And he misses the point that lots of us have tried ignoring the signals to lie down, and have pushed through, and it ends up very badly indeed. In my case, I think of my son who tried to attend a school he really wanted to be at, and played sport he really wanted to play, and ended up asleep for 20 hours a day and zombie-like for the remaining four hours a day, having to be helped to the toilet and otherwise bedridden, for a month, and only gradually coming back to his baseline over a year. I don't think, even with the strongest will in the world, he could have been awake much more or moved much more than he did. I know that, because I was the one trying to keep him awake long enough to get enough water and food into him to keep him alive, and it wasn't easy*. I suspect that shutting down is a very strong protective response, stopping more activity and giving the body time to get back to a healthier state.

I find the idea that Lloyd and his team want to experiment with stimulants to override that protective response very concerning.

*edit (With hindsight, my son should have been in a hospital on an IV-line, and I wonder why on earth I didn't get a doctor to see him, but I was sick and I had a daughter who was sick. By that time we had all lost confidence in doctors. We had strongly been given the message that doctors weren't interested or able to help. That time is just a blur of trying to get through it.)



There was a video where Lloyd had a few graduates of his Fatigue Clinic give endorsements, and it was quite telling how they talked more about having learned to live with their symptoms, rather than being symptom-free. It's covered in a thread here somewhere I think. If not, it must be on PR. I was surprised that he couldn't find people to give more convincing endorsements, as I know, from the experience of seeing my daughter recover over two years (with no particular interventions) that there are people who recover naturally and who therefore could be convinced that a Fatigue Clinic was instrumental in that recovery.
Click to expand...

Well now I know the context yes it is even more concerning. Not far off the Wessely (I think it was) throwing the kid in the swimming pool incident. Which of course is a basic analogy for disability bigotry. Whether said kid sank or swam proved nothing but I bet being able to do so became a message to whoever did it about how much power they possessed/what they could get away with.

And yes I know the next part is the 'overt' bit that he 'owns' behind his phrase but I doubt the insinuation to this was accidental otherwise there were numerous other ways of him saying it.

The trope of if a disabled person moves out of a dangerous situation under conditions of adrenaline that proves the perpetrator right theory. And the perpetrator makes damn sure no independent witness (who will be believed) is around to see the days or weeks of harm they caused by that shouting at the horrendously ill person.

So is this a manifesto for him justifying abuse? I think the way he has caveated it as an 'if' rather than a confession is insightful. How is it that he knows? And clearly his words are encouraging this behaviour.. disturbing

He should go around doing that to patients who are ill with cancer on chemo and prove the same point. Common sense from laypersons tends to prevail here I'd hope.

Has he 'straw-manned' it by pretending [putting words in our mouths] we are saying it is a signalling issue rather than a systemic disability? That if it wasn't signalling the only other things is this nonsense of 'the mind' they keep pretending to know about (and their personal 'talents' are such I doubt they are anything other than the worst placed for such a task).

What he has said is stupid and shows he isn't talking about the disease/condition of ME/CFS at all.

Here's an idea: if he wants to 'catch out' the people who don't have ME, put them through 6months of stuff above their threshold (like GET and 'CET) then test using a 2-day CPET or just whether their life and health has fallen apart (and even more appropriately will over the coming years) because you didn't give time for the PEM to be recovered on a repeated basis. I'm assuming that if regulation required that anyone undertaking his treatment did these independent tests and funding was provided (even by a charity appeal) in order that any personal injury suits would have this information to take to court he'd still be as die-hard as to who was what when he read the initial 2-day CPETs?

It seems we are now about to go through the phase where there are indicators like heart rate etc being developed but the bigots are focusing on trying to infer even these 'could be caused by the mind'.

How can these people try 'getting into' warping the old HPA axis idea to their own ends yet conveniently forget it is actually about adrenaline in life-endangering situations and explains the 'bullied in office' scenario. So what it has bad effects on 'dysfunction' according to their nonsense models in general but someone frightening a terribly ill person deliberately causes no harm and proves everything? But it really isn't safe or kind and shouldn't be legal for someone to do to someone ill just because they have power of access to them. According to the many years of literature before they began warping it.

Yes, fight or flight is absolutely about adrenaline response to being shouted at and the mom who lifts the car off the child - doesn't mean they can lift a car, nor does it mean they have no injuries from doing so.

Medicine are making fools of their profession by allowing this, FND nonsense from neurologist and BACME's sales stuff to go uncalled out by themselves. The point of a profession is having standards for those who are part of it.

The laugh is the people who want to talk about the mind are the same ones who struggle to understand anything that has a human being part attached to it as an 'input' - so I'm beginning to think it is just a big old pseudonym for 'the information/knowledge bit that this lot can't do' and farming it all out, inexplicably to one place alone (that bit can only be explained by 'hysterical woman' type bigotry in my mind, why not any other science dept?). Although I do get their personality type's attraction to the idea of the 'unconscious' meaning they don't have to listen to what people say but infer past it.

Science requires a lot more than one dodgy observer's assumptions finding another with the same ideology affecting their ability to observe, understand and be curious - and they are so far off Oliver Sachs I'd say they were opposites. Imagine how short his books would have been if line 1 was 'shouted at them and they moved so sent them off for CET'.
 
Last edited:
Holinger said:
I find Andrew Lloyd a completely perplexing person with his views on me/cfs. He is ok with putting his name on this study but has a thoroughly contrasting view in the interview below when explaining about psychosocial or vulnerability not being factors in the developments of me/cfs. He is clearly a smart man but it is as if he is being pulled by a mixture of his own views and bps researchers that have a more psychosomatic view. I don’t get it.
https://www.mja.com.au/podcast/212/...12-chronic-fatigue-syndrome-prof-andrew-lloyd
Click to expand...

I don't think of him as a smart man but mainly as a player. His views have been clear from the onset (and I've met people who have been seen by him) but he needs to appear to be like a real open minded researcher or scientist so he can attract attention and keep on the game.
 
Lloyd is concerned only with protecting his lucrative psycho-behavioural based clinic, and extending its, um, client base to Long Covid patients.

There really isn't much more to it than that.

His 2020 claim about patient critics being akin to climate deniers has not aged well in light of NICE's 2021 assessment of the evidence being of mostly very low quality, and the remainder of low quality. Which is another way of saying those critics were correct.
 
Last edited:
Prevalence and Characteristics Associated With Post-COVID-19 Condition Among Non-hospitalized Adolescents and Young Adults

Abstract
Importance The prevalence and baseline risk factors of post–COVID-19 condition (PCC) remain unresolved among the large number of young people who experienced mild COVID-19.

Objectives To determine the point prevalence of PCC 6 months after the acute infection, to determine the risk of development of PCC adjusted for possible confounders, and to explore a broad range of potential risk factors.

Design, Setting, and Participants This cohort study included nonhospitalized individuals from 2 counties in Norway between ages 12 and 25 years who underwent reverse transcription–polymerase chain reaction (RT-PCR) testing. At the early convalescent stage and at 6-month follow-up, participants underwent a clinical examination; pulmonary, cardiac, and cognitive functional testing; immunological and organ injury biomarker analyses; and completion of a questionnaire. Participants were classified according to the World Health Organization case definition of PCC at follow-up. Association analyses of 78 potential risk factors were performed.

Exposures SARS-CoV-2 infection.

Main Outcomes and Measures The point prevalence of PCC 6 months after RT-PCR testing in the SARS-CoV-2–positive and SARS-CoV-2–negative groups, and the risk difference with corresponding 95% CIs.

Results A total of 404 individuals testing positive for SARS-CoV-2 and 105 individuals testing negative were enrolled (194 male [38.1%]; 102 non-European [20.0%] ethnicity). A total of 22 of the SARS-CoV-2–positive and 4 of the SARS-CoV-2–negative individuals were lost to follow-up, and 16 SARS-CoV-2–negative individuals were excluded due to SARS-CoV-2 infection in the observational period. Hence, 382 SARS-CoV-2–positive participants (mean [SD] age, 18.0 [3.7] years; 152 male [39.8%]) and 85 SARS-CoV-2–negative participants (mean [SD] age, 17.7 [3.2] years; 31 male [36.5%]) could be evaluated. The point prevalence of PCC at 6 months was 48.5% in the SARS-CoV-2–positive group and 47.1% in the control group (risk difference, 1.5%; 95% CI, −10.2% to 13.1%). SARS-CoV-2 positivity was not associated with the development of PCC (relative risk [RR], 1.06; 95% CI, 0.83 to 1.37; final multivariable model utilizing modified Poisson regression). The main risk factor for PCC was symptom severity at baseline (RR, 1.41; 95% CI, 1.27-1.56). Low physical activity (RR, 0.96; 95% CI, 0.92-1.00) and loneliness (RR, 1.01; 95% CI, 1.00-1.02) were also associated, while biological markers were not. Symptom severity correlated with personality traits.

Conclusions and Relevance The persistent symptoms and disability that characterize PCC are associated with factors other than SARS-CoV-2 infection, including psychosocial factors. This finding raises questions about the utility of the World Health Organization case definition and has implications for the planning of health care services as well as for further research on PCC.

https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jamanetworkopen/fullarticle/2802893
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Back
Top Bottom