Trial Report REGAIN: A Randomized Controlled Clinical Trial of Oxaloacetate for Improving the Symptoms of Long COVID, 2025, Vernon et al

[ME/CFS Science Blog]

I think there is clearly no effect for fatigue or physical functioning, but the scores on the cognitive test (the DANA Brain Vital) do seem to show an improvement in the treatment group compared to controls.

 

[ME/CFS Science Blog]

The authors used percentage difference scores from visit 1, which often makes the analysis more sensitive to outliers (e.g. participants who had a very low score to start with, could improve by 80-100%). So it would be interesting to check if the results hold up if they used the absolute scores (while controlling for baseline scores in a regression model).

 

[ME/CFS Science Blog]

For other outcome measures they used Tukey's post hoc HSD but for the cognitive testing they used a linear mixed-effects model where it isn't clear if they corrected for multiple comparisons.

 

[Utsikt]

The authors used percentage difference scores from visit 1, which often makes the analysis more sensitive to outliers (e.g. participants who had a very low score to start with, could improve by 80-100%). So it would be interesting to check if the results hold up if they used the absolute scores (while controlling for baseline scores in a regression model).

It seems like they sometimes used percentages and sometimes absolute values. I don’t know of they had a protocol or what it said.

 

[ME/CFS Science Blog]

It’s very frustrating for me to see people I genuinely care about all over bluesky starting to worry about saving up to try this supplement. I don’t have the energy to argue-explain to every one of them that this study isn’t very good…

Made some comments about it here:

 

[Yann04]

Made some comments about it here:

Amazing!

 

[MAXI]

Regardless of the quality of the paper: the truth is that we as a group, although have much in common, are still individually quite different , which explains that in some forums incl. reddit I found some people improving at 2 g OAA. The same is true with Rapamycin/Sirolimus and others.

 

[Utsikt]

Regardless of the quality of the paper: the truth is that we as a group, although have much in common, are still individually quite different , which explains that in some forums incl. reddit I found some people improving at 2 g OAA. The same is true with Rapamycin/Sirolimus and others.

Hi and welcome MAXI,

The problem with anecdotes is that they can’t be used to establish causality. There are lots of anecdotes about all kinds of things, and the only thing they have in common is that they usually fail to show any efficacy in controlled trials.

Consider this example:
We know that spontaneous recovery or improvements happen on rare occasions. If someone always experiments with one or more intervention, and by pure chance recovers or improves, then their recovery or improvement will correlate with at least one intervention. But we have no way of proving that the intervention caused the improvement.