Relationship satisfaction, communication self-efficacy, and chronic fatigue syndrome-related fatigue, 2019, Milrad et al

Nancy Klimas is a named author on this.

Paywall, https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0277953619303776
Sci hub, https://sci-hub.se/10.1016/j.socscimed.2019.112392

 

Why is Klimas wasting precious time and resources on psychosocial factors?

There are far more important aspects that should be pursued.

Maybe I'm missing something?

 

Don't want to defend this. But she's next-to-last author, which I understand is the least important placement. My guess would be her involvement was limited to providing some kind of info on patients. Perhaps contact info? The question would be whether she knew fully what the intention of the PI was. If so, why would she agree to something like this, though it wouldn't be the first time; if not, why not? What surprises me just a bit more is seeing Fletcher's name as well.

 

AYFKM with this?

Not mixing cause and effect is science 101. No matter how many times you try to figure out how the smoke started the fire it still did not start the damn fire.

Also: WTF is a relationship? This damned disease destroyed all of mine.

 

I wonder why Dr. Klimas is involved in this - I have great respect for her.

At any rate, this looks like it is leading to couples counseling for "cfs". And why do they just keep calling it "CFS"?

 

Exactly how do you target therapeutically relationship-related mediating variables.

Is it dial-a-friend, or friends-on-wheels, or prescription only friends?

Rub-on friends? Friend patches? IV friends?

 

I had to look up AYFKM!

 

I disagree with this sentence. We have no idea if relationship satisfaction or depression are impacting CFS-related fatigue. The impact could be quite plausibly be zero. It is just difficult to tell because fatigue is a nonspecific symptom of various problems and we cannot tell how much each of these is contributing to a patient's fatigue score.

I interpret "CFS-related" to mean caused by the disease process that produces the syndrome.

Worded differently: they seem to be proposing a mathematical relationship where relationship satisfaction and depression multiply fatigue caused by CFS, rater than adding to fatigue separately.

I'm nitpicking but it's interesting to pick apart what appears to be underlying assumptions.

 

Binge watching 90s sitcoms?

 

The problem is that there is a common bias, namely questionnaire answering behaviour.

This method does not separate the effect of (a negative bias on) questionnaire answering behaviour from depression itself.

The only way to resolve this is to use objective measures of fatigue on functioning.

 

Given the car crash of the genetics study that also bore her name earlier this year she may be too busy to attend to detail?
Concerning given it's not the first paper to suffer from GIGO

 

Mee too. Getting old.

 

I usually restrict the number of uncensored Fs in my comments as it is already pretty high but clearly I'm imposing hardship on others so now I'm questioning the wisdom of this restraint.

 

If science teaches us anything, it's that it's always possible to MAKE new friends...