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Biomarker for chronic fatigue syndrome identified

med.stanford.edu

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Re: Biomarker for chronic fatigue syndrome identified

#101

Post by pjc50 »

heavenlyblue wrote: post #67
ipunchghosts wrote: post #57

Journalists, this is quite the story. Here you have a bunch of really sick patients with docs around the world saying it's in there head. Then a UK study comes out (PACE) saying patients should engage in activity to help themselves. This only makes the patients worse and eventually so bad that the study was pulled. In comes dr ron davis. His son acquired me cfs while traveling in india. Completely unsatisfied with th…

>> This folks is how science is supposed to unfold and it all happening right in front of our eyes for everyone to see in real time. Quite astonishing. So you imply that only scientists with money and direct personal interest in the research are supposed to work on the given topic?

That was the whole of science before about 1850.

Re: Biomarker for chronic fatigue syndrome identified

#102

Post by heavenlyblue »

ipunchghosts wrote: post #71
heavenlyblue wrote: post #67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>> This folks is how science is supposed to unfold and it all happening right in front of our eyes for everyone to see in real time. Quite astonishing. So you imply that only scientists with money and direct personal interest in the research are supposed to work on the given topic?

Not at all. What i mean is that scientists discovered a problem and 1) pursued it regardless of what the major funding agencies thought of it 2) encouraged patients to get involved and 3) informed the public of their progress regularly allowing for open discussion and collaboration.

No wait - the scientist was a father of a person who had the illness, and the father had a team of scientists willing to work on the issue he himself decided to work on.

You on the other hand are selling it as if all of those researchers were working for free at the time.

Re: Biomarker for chronic fatigue syndrome identified

#103

Post by ufo »

verroq wrote: post #66
freeradical13 wrote: post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I see, so basically instead of intuiting a simple threshold (e.g. >X% change), they apply an SVM which is able to discover more accurate thresholds (and error ranges). Do you have any suggested resources on learning more about SVM? I guess my question comes from the observation that these advanced statistical techniques such as machine learning haven't been around for long and yet medicine has often created decision…

SVMs are as old school ML as they get. They guarentee the maximum separation at the decision boundary. However it doesn’t scale very well for higher dimensional data. The standard used to be to use some dimensionality reduction technique like PCA to preprocess before feeding it into the SVM. This is all before deep learning.

Exactly. Perhaps the paper could have given a clearer message if the abstract had characterized SVMs as a quadratic optimization technique instead of as machine learning?

Re: Biomarker for chronic fatigue syndrome identified

#104

Post by ipunchghosts »

kens wrote: post #100
ipunchghosts wrote: post #57

Journalists, this is quite the story. Here you have a bunch of really sick patients with docs around the world saying it's in there head. Then a UK study comes out (PACE) saying patients should engage in activity to help themselves. This only makes the patients worse and eventually so bad that the study was pulled. In comes dr ron davis. His son acquired me cfs while traveling in india. Completely unsatisfied with th…

As a cautionary note, consider the Whittemore Peterson Institute for Neuro-Immune Disease. It was founded by parents of a CFS patient to research CFS. In 2006, this institute found the XMRV virus in CFS patients, showing a physical basis for CFS and the potential for a cure. Unfortunately, XMRV turned out to be a lab contaminant, leading to retracted publications, people being fired, and a big mess. Of course, this i…

Humans making mistakes is nothing new. This is why the open medical foundation is so open; other people can critique and replicate the work if desired.

Re: Biomarker for chronic fatigue syndrome identified

#105

Post by nyolfen »

heavenlyblue wrote: post #102
ipunchghosts wrote: post #71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not at all. What i mean is that scientists discovered a problem and 1) pursued it regardless of what the major funding agencies thought of it 2) encouraged patients to get involved and 3) informed the public of their progress regularly allowing for open discussion and collaboration.

No wait - the scientist was a father of a person who had the illness, and the father had a team of scientists willing to work on the issue he himself decided to work on. You on the other hand are selling it as if all of those researchers were working for free at the time.

you should re-read his comments

Re: Biomarker for chronic fatigue syndrome identified

#106

Post by rfugger »

jdietrich wrote: post #48
whalabi wrote: post #31

I'm just astonished by this. Millions of people (in the US alone!) suffer from this illness and I think everyone has wondered, or heard it wondered, if it's imaginary. For all these people to know there's something actually physically wrong with them is massive. It'll shift the thinking of everyone in the profession, of their families and friends and colleagues, and of themselves. It's a huge, huge breakthrough.

>Millions of people (in the US alone!) suffer from this illness and I think everyone has wondered, or heard it wondered, if it's imaginary. For all these people to know there's something actually physically wrong with them is massive. IMO the broader issue is the stigma against mental illness. The leading hypothesis remains that chronic fatigue syndrome is a mental illness. Both your comment and the linked article im…

The issue with CFS isn't to do with stigma against mental illness. It's with the mainstream medical community being uninterested in anything other than mental health treatments for a disease that clearly has a physical (viral/immune) component in the vast majority of cases. There are drugs for depression, and vast amounts of research has gone into their development. Why no similar research effort into drugs for CFS? It's not because we don't know what causes it -- we don't know what causes depression in many cases. It's not because there aren't enough sufferers -- there are millions. It's not because of lack of demand, or lack of existing costs to medical systems, or anything like that.

It's because the medical establishment doesn't really think CFS is a thing. They don't care about it, they don't pay attention to it, they don't see it as real. It's not a fatal disease in the same way that cancer is, and its symptoms sound like a teenager complaining about not wanting to go to school. The answer, as far as the medical establishment is concerned, is that nothing's really terribly wrong, buck up, and you'll be better soon. Oh, and take these antidepressants. Any mental illness inevitably brought on by being chronically physically ill (and not really believed) is pointed to as the underlying issue.

(I mean the above to represent how the medical community collectively sees CFS. There are certainly individuals within the community who take it very seriously. There are simply too few of them, and too few in positions of authority. And, to be fair, as I commented below, it can be very difficult to distinguish between CFS and a neurotic who just needs to be told they are fine and sent home, especially if you only have a very short time to interview them.)

It's upsetting, but it's easy to see how a bunch of what seem like tired, unhappy people with normal blood tests aren't leaping out as needing special attention. That's why a biomarker is massive. All of a sudden the medical community has to pay attention, will want to pay attention. It's a huge new drug market, if nothing else...

Let's hope this biomarker holds up under further tests. There's still a long way to go before I get too excited.

Re: Biomarker for chronic fatigue syndrome identified

#107

Post by not_a_moth »

Since poor sleep quality is a core symptom of CFS I can't help wonder if sleep is the underlying component. I think we've all underestimated the critical nature of sleep in immune, metabolic, stress, cognitive aspects, etc. It's also hard to self-assess the quality of your sleep, eg. clock-time at each phase, central apnea events, 02 saturation, noise/ light/ movement disturbances while you are asleep, etc.

Re: Biomarker for chronic fatigue syndrome identified

#108

Post by rfugger »

AdamCraven wrote: post #69
whalabi wrote: post #31

I'm just astonished by this. Millions of people (in the US alone!) suffer from this illness and I think everyone has wondered, or heard it wondered, if it's imaginary. For all these people to know there's something actually physically wrong with them is massive. It'll shift the thinking of everyone in the profession, of their families and friends and colleagues, and of themselves. It's a huge, huge breakthrough.

As someone who has suffered from CFS for a long time, it is definitely not imaginary. To say it’s purely physical is discounting the mental aspect of the disease. I personally suffered trauma as a child and I’ve seen first hand what strong negative emotions can do to the body. I would think it unlikely that there will be a miracle drug that will cure it, I believe it is a disease of both the mental and physical. For…

I don't disagree, but I still have hope. Most CFS cases come on suddenly with an infection, and something breaks in the body. That situation may have been brought on by a gradual weakening of the system over time due to stress, etc., but that doesn't mean that whatever has broken can't be fixed or reset in some way.

Re: Biomarker for chronic fatigue syndrome identified

#110

Post by rfugger »

rjsw wrote: post #28
rfugger wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is true, but everything is complex only up to the point when you begin to understand it. Scurvy was a complex disease until the discovery that it was cured and prevented by citrus fruit(1). Now we have the technology to skip right to the discovery of vitamin C, a miraculous 100% accurate test for scurvy. I know I'm oversimplifying, but I think the point is valid. This is why discovery of a biomarker is so crucia…

Maybe link to the original blog article [1], your link is just a summary. [1] http://idlewords.com/2010/03/scott_and_scurvy.htm

Thanks -- I just copied the first link I found in a search engine.
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