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Scientists Edge Closer To Lab Test For Chronic Fatigue Syndrome

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Re: Scientists Edge Closer To Lab Test For Chronic Fatigue Syndrome

#21

Post by mudil »

dEnigma wrote: post #20
mudil wrote: post #17

I am an MD, born in Russia, but did medical school here in the United States. All the same, people constantly ask about the Russian medicine, and so I was recently asked if we have fibromyalgia in Russia. My answer was that I don't know about fibromyalgia. But what I know is that half of the psychotropic drugs that people are prescribed in this country we only give to political prisoners in Russia.

How do you know this? Has the Russian government a public list of psychotropic drugs it uses on its political prisoners?

Right, Russian government publishes a list of psychotropic substances that are given to political prisoners. Jeez, people, it's a joke. The joke is a commentary about American proclivity to eat psychotropic meds like vitamins.

Re: Scientists Edge Closer To Lab Test For Chronic Fatigue Syndrome

#22

Post by jdietrich »

carbocation wrote: post #2

The article is here: http://www.pnas.org/content/early/2017/07/25/1710519114.full... It's worth noting that their false discovery rate was not study-wide, but rather group-wide. As they state at the very end of the paper, " FDR control was performed separately by group (e.g., severity level) to allow for group differences in the proportions of truly null hypotheses ". So, if you try to look at all significant P-value…

It's also worth noting that there is no clear causal relationship. There is a strong and well-established association between depression and inflammatory biomarkers, but we have very little idea of whether depression increases the risk of inflammatory illness or vice-versa.

http://www.mdedge.com/currentpsychiatry/article/76288/depres...

Re: Scientists Edge Closer To Lab Test For Chronic Fatigue Syndrome

#23

Post by AnimalMuppet »

pfisch wrote: post #10
revscat wrote: post #6

Can I ask an honest, albeit admittedly cynical, question? In a world run by libertarian capitalists, what good comes from such studies? I know such things can be used to determine policy. But let's say that in turns out cytokines do, in fact, cause CFS, and that -- for the sake of argument -- banning them would be a good thing. How would this newfound knowledge go from being something known to having action taken upo…

Are you a bot or a real person? How could you ban cytokines? That doesn't even mean anything to the point where I'm not sure you are a human author.

2464 karma, so probably no, not a bot.

Highly clueless about cytokines, though...

Re: Scientists Edge Closer To Lab Test For Chronic Fatigue Syndrome

#24

Post by tomcam »

propman wrote: post #9

If someone comes to you with a whole lot of pain and loss of function, ignoring it and thinking it's just in their head/they just need to toughen up and get over it because nothing showed up in thier blood reports is something that is almost ubiquitous in the medical field today. I have a connective tissue disorder that was ignored for years because nothing showed up in my blood report and I looked healthy. There is…

MD's are by and large incredibly non-curious about hard-to-diagnose chronic conditions

Re: Scientists Edge Closer To Lab Test For Chronic Fatigue Syndrome

#25

Post by dawhizkid »

Surprised no one has mentioned a Keto diet yet as a potential remedy for CFS. One of the biggest benefits of Keto is its anti-inflammatory effects.

A quick Google search brings up at least a few research papers showing that Ketogenic diets have been seen to suppress the expression of inflammatory cytokines.

Re: Scientists Edge Closer To Lab Test For Chronic Fatigue Syndrome

#26

Post by o_____________o »

tomcam wrote: post #24
propman wrote: post #9

If someone comes to you with a whole lot of pain and loss of function, ignoring it and thinking it's just in their head/they just need to toughen up and get over it because nothing showed up in thier blood reports is something that is almost ubiquitous in the medical field today. I have a connective tissue disorder that was ignored for years because nothing showed up in my blood report and I looked healthy. There is…

MD's are by and large incredibly non-curious about hard-to-diagnose chronic conditions

What incentive do they have besides being a heroic, indefatigable person? If anything, they're increasing their attack surface for being blamed or sued.

Re: Scientists Edge Closer To Lab Test For Chronic Fatigue Syndrome

#27

Post by dEnigma »

mudil wrote: post #21
dEnigma wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How do you know this? Has the Russian government a public list of psychotropic drugs it uses on its political prisoners?

Right, Russian government publishes a list of psychotropic substances that are given to political prisoners. Jeez, people, it's a joke. The joke is a commentary about American proclivity to eat psychotropic meds like vitamins.

I was under the impression that you seriously thought you knew which drugs the Russian government uses on its prisoners and was making a tongue-in-cheek remark in response.

Re: Scientists Edge Closer To Lab Test For Chronic Fatigue Syndrome

#28

Post by kens »

I looked at the paper and the data is kind of strange. Looking at figure 2, there are a bunch of cytokines that have a nice linear progression with increasing levels corresponding to increasing severity of disease. This seems like solid evidence that more cytokine = bad.

But if you compare with the controls, mild cases of ME/CFS have less than the control, moderate cases have the same as controls, and severe cases have more. This kind of torpedoes any simple explanation of what's going on. The authors discuss this in a kind of hand-wavy way that maybe ME/CFS causes some down-regulation to start with and then the increasing trend is on top of that.

So, I'm not sure what to make of this. It seems useless as a test at this point: "You have totally normal cytokine levels, indicating that you're either healthy or have moderate ME/CFS."

Re: Scientists Edge Closer To Lab Test For Chronic Fatigue Syndrome

#29

Post by komali2 »

o_____________o wrote: post #26
tomcam wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

MD's are by and large incredibly non-curious about hard-to-diagnose chronic conditions

What incentive do they have besides being a heroic, indefatigable person? If anything, they're increasing their attack surface for being blamed or sued.

Curious about this. I often find engineers motivated purely by the desire to solve the problem. Was just at defcon - witnessed many people vaguely wandering around the tables of teams trying to hack devices, then getting sucked in as they offered solutions and inevitably got involved with trying to solve the problem. Did it myself a couple times, even though I had planned on attending more talks.

Re: Scientists Edge Closer To Lab Test For Chronic Fatigue Syndrome

#30

Post by Real_S »

carbocation wrote: post #2

The article is here: http://www.pnas.org/content/early/2017/07/25/1710519114.full... It's worth noting that their false discovery rate was not study-wide, but rather group-wide. As they state at the very end of the paper, " FDR control was performed separately by group (e.g., severity level) to allow for group differences in the proportions of truly null hypotheses ". So, if you try to look at all significant P-value…

If you follow their methods, specifically [63], they are modelling the proportion of null hypotheses in their tests. Performing FDR by group is a reasonable approach, and does not necessarily cause P-value inflation. This is different from a Bonferroni correction, in which total numbers of tests done is the only factor. These FDR models of the proportion of null hypotheses rely on the distribution of p-values, not their raw count (assuming a sufficient count of P-values is present in which to model). Dividing the FDR correction as they did provides more information about group-specific influences, and should not be considered p-value hacking.

Nevertheless, thank you for calling this out. There is way too much p-hacking in science, especially biology.

[63] Benjamini Y, Krieger AM, Yekutieli D (2006) Adaptive linear step-up procedures that control the false discovery rate. Biometrika 93:491–507.

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