Psychological and demographic factors associated with fatigue and social adjustment in young people with severe CFS/ME (2018) Chalder et al

@Michiel Tack Thanks for doing this.

I think you will probably have to submit your letter as a manuscript – although you might want to double check that. Technical info for submissions to the journal here: https://www.editorialmanager.com/jobm/default.aspx

I would recommend getting an ORCHID ID if you have not already got one, as this is a generic ID which is needed to submit a manuscript to any science journal. Not all journals require ORCHID for letters though, and some ask you to register with their own systems too. Be prepared that it may take a couple of hours to get the IDs and fill in all the necessary forms.

If you’d like me to have a look at the letter, or need any other advice, please feel free to copy me in on any private conversations.
 
Robert 1973 said:
I would recommend getting an ORCHID ID if you have not already got one, as this is a generic ID which is needed to submit a manuscript to any science journal. Not all journals require ORCHID for letters though, and some ask you to register with their own systems too. Be prepared that it may take a couple of hours to get the IDs and fill in all the necessary forms.
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Thanks, that's exactly what I needed to know.
 
Michiel Tack said:
Because there is a factual error in the abstract, I've written a short comment I would like to submit to the journal.

I do not have experience with this however. Are there any forum members who do have experience with submitting letters and could help me out in PM?

Many thanks in advance,

EDIT: I don't know who has done this in the past, so I'm just going to tag some of the more experienced forum members.

@Graham @Esther12 @Sean @Robert 1973 @Dolphin @Tom Kindlon @Adrian
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Letters to the Editor

Journal of Behavioral Medicine may occasionally publish Letters to the Editor that offer opinion or interpretation of articles previously published in the journal. Letters should be limited to 500 words or less. Tables and figures should be used only if absolutely necessary. It is customary for letters to be sent to the author(s) of the original work and the authors’ response may be published as a companion to the Letter to the Editor.
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You could look through the journal to see how many references letters had. Some journals only allow letters to have 5 references.
 
Robert 1973 said:
I would recommend getting an ORCHID ID if you have not already got one, as this is a generic ID which is needed to submit a manuscript to any science journal. Not all journals require ORCHID for letters though, and some ask you to register with their own systems too. Be prepared that it may take a couple of hours to get the IDs and fill in all the necessary forms.
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I have never had this issue (i.e. requiring a ORCHID ID). But certainly it does take a while to submit any publication, including a letter.
 
Dolphin said:
I have never had this issue (i.e. requiring a ORCHID ID). But certainly it does take a while to submit any publication, including a letter.
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I'm sure I needed one for my Lancet letter - as well as having to register with their EES system. Perhaps I only needed to provide my ORCHID ID after the letter was accepted.

But Dolphin has a lot more experience than me, so I'm clearly wrong about it being needed for all science journals.
 
I just had a quick look at this, so here are some notes.

They say a higher IQ is a risk factor for CFS? Was that just from the one study where they assumed low IQ would be a risk factor, found a higher IQ was associated with diagnosis, and then said it was a trivial finding? (They lumped all their references for risk factors together, so it would be a bit of a pain to check).

It seems like they make a lot of claims based on very tentative data so I'm not going to pull out all the examples (other people have mentioned some earlier in the thread). It's a bit depressing that they're not more cautious with their narrative building, even post PACE-gate.

"In phase 2 of recruitment, in order to increase recruit-
ment rates, the threshold for severity was raised to 50%. At
this level, a person would still experience moderate
symptoms which would increase following activity. Three
participants were recruited during this second phase."

What? So they changed their entry cut-off from 30 to 50 for just three more participants?

"43 participants (84.3%) met the Oxford criteria for CFS/ME"

I wonder why the other participants not meet it? That seems odd considering how loose Oxford is, and that this started as an attempt to study those with severe CFS/ME.

"Correlations

The results of the correlation analyses can be seen in
Table 3. In summary, significant associations were found
between the following variables: stronger fear avoidance
beliefs were associated with higher levels of fatigue at T1,
and with worse social adjustment at T1 and T2. Female
gender was significantly associated with lower levels of
school attendance at T1 and T2. Similarly, access to
treatment was associated with lower levels of school
attendance at T1 and T2."

But, as @Michiel Tack pointed out, the abstract says:

"Stronger fear avoidance beliefs at T1 were associated
with higher fatigue at T2, and with worse social adjustment
at T1 and T2."

How can they have got this wrong. Anything here we're missing?

"As seen in the Table A1 in the supplementary material, the
addition of time as a covariate did not alter the findings of
the multiple regression analyses except that the variables
fear avoidance and gender were not significant predictors
of T2 social adjustment."

That seems like a fairly important alteration to a finding emphasised in the paper's abstract.
 
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Andy said:
Blog on this study, https://questioning-answers.blogspo...ed-treatment-associated-lower-attendance.html
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The most popular treatment 'accessed' was "CBT, GET or both with at least one other treatment" closely followed by "CBT, GET or both." Allied to other independent data suggesting that cognitive behavioural therapy (CBT) and graded exercise therapy (GET) are failing many patients with ME/CFS (see here and see here and see here), and the case grows ever stronger for new treatment directions to be pursued. Such research directions should perhaps also be minus words like 'fear avoidance' or other psychobabble inclinations that have pervaded ME/CFS thought down the years. Indeed, one has to ask who would advocate for treatments that are seemingly at best ineffective and at worst downright detrimental to the patient group who are 'accessing' them?
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