NIH Presentation on Chronic Fatigue Syndrome (ME/CFS) Study Hits the Mark

[IrisRV]

In the middle of my first sentence I realized the obstacles that @nibs enumerated above and asked who was going to suggest it here.

A question worth asking ourselves is what is the purpose of a disease control and which illnesses are most likely to fit that purpose. I'm not convinced Ebola is one of them, but I'm willing to be convinced.

 

[Hello!]

Right. Many of the diseases that come to mind for controls, like MS, have some overlap of symptoms. The overlap could confound or differentiate, it's hard to know on this side of it. What would be nice is if they were to crack the fatigue, PEM, and brain fog nuts in the process. So many diseases and syndromes share these symptoms and we know so little about them. Who has them, who doesn't? What is the etiology? Is the etiology the same across diseases? How do we get rid of them?

 

[IrisRV]

I read a bit about disease controls a while back, but now most of it is gone. Darned memory problems.

IIRC (and I may not), you want a comparison disease that has some similarities and some known differences. Then you can see what lab results they have in common, which might direct you towards the reason for some symptoms they have in common such as OI or cognitive dysfunction.

You can also look at the lab results that are different and try to correlate them to the symptoms that are different between the diseases. In other words, the lab results that are unique to the illness being studied (ME/CFS in this case) might be the distinguishing factors in the illness. Something like the beginnings of a differential diagnosis.

This is one of the reasons why it is puzzling to me that they were considering FMD as a disease control. What were they imagining the commonalities to be and how did they expect to test for them? As far as I can see, the only commonality is that both have been considered by some people to be disorders with a psychiatric basis. In that case, what lab tests are you looking for to identify similarities and differences?

I think some dumb didn't get the memo and just looked up a disease they thought was similar to CFS, a psychogenic condition. It was probably some poor schmuck of a lab assistant who was given a 'simple' task without any background information on the study.