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> ME/CFS is unquestionably biologically rooted, says Avindra Nath, clinical director of the U.S. National Institute of Neurological Disorders and Stroke, who le

by CPLX 3y ago

> ME/CFS is unquestionably biologically rooted, says Avindra Nath, clinical director of the U.S. National Institute of Neurological Disorders and Stroke, who led the study. It revealed brain activity differences, along with immune and other abnormalities, in 17 people with ME/CFS compared with 21 healthy controls Not expressing my own opinion on the condition itself but this sentence makes absolutely no sense. How on earth can you have a sample size that tiny and then use the word “unquestionably” as if you mean it. You could fit the whole study in a school bus. Being wrong about one person would be statistically significant.

bombcar 3y ago
The sample size worries me less than the cause/effect swapping possibility - people who think they have X might cause abnormalities that show up biologically. We know it can happen with placebos.
derefr 3y ago
> How on earth can you have a sample size that tiny and then use the word “unquestionably” as if you mean it. Because the first sentence is the lead researcher's opinion (that they likely already held going into the study, due to overwhelming clinical — rather than scientific — evidence); not an expression of the credence that you should hold in the hypothesis, coming from null priors, due purely to the Bayesian evidence presented by the study. A more pedantic rephrase of the first sentence you quoted, would be something like "no doctor who regularly sees ME/CFS patients would doubt the claim that ME/CFS has an organic — rather than psychogenic — etiology." Those doctors now just need to conduct enough studies to prove that claim to the satisfaction of people who aren't doctors and who don't regularly see ME/CFS patients. This is the first step of that. The result that such studies expect to find — at least to these doctors — isn't in question. "A pile of 1000 independent anecdotes of case-histories from professional clinicians that all corroborate the claim" just needs to be replaced with an equally-sized "pile of laboratory-condition-verified tests done in a way standardized enough to be aggregated as data and T-tested."
jdietrich 3y ago
It also doesn't really mean anything unless you're a strict mind-body dualist, because the brain is an organ. People with depression also have brain activity differences and are more likely to have elevated inflammatory markers. Having an autoimmune disorder increases your likelihood of being diagnosed with depression and vice-versa. There is no clear boundary between the biological and the psychological; emotion and cognition are biological processes in exactly the same way as digestion or respiration. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC9540243/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC9540243/ https://ajp.psychiatryonline.org/doi/10.1176/appi.ajp.2020.20060947 https://ajp.psychiatryonline.org/doi/10.1176/appi.ajp.2020.2... https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5338810/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5338810/

by CPLX 3y ago

bombcar 3y ago

The sample size worries me less than the cause/effect swapping possibility - people who think they have X might cause abnormalities that show up biologically. We know it can happen with placebos.

derefr 3y ago

> How on earth can you have a sample size that tiny and then use the word “unquestionably” as if you mean it. Because the first sentence is the lead researcher's opinion (that they likely already held going into the study, due to overwhelming clinical — rather than scientific — evidence); not an expression of the credence that you should hold in the hypothesis, coming from null priors, due purely to the Bayesian evidence presented by the study. A more pedantic rephrase of the first sentence you quoted, would be something like "no doctor who regularly sees ME/CFS patients would doubt the claim that ME/CFS has an organic — rather than psychogenic — etiology." Those doctors now just need to conduct enough studies to prove that claim to the satisfaction of people who aren't doctors and who don't regularly see ME/CFS patients. This is the first step of that. The result that such studies expect to find — at least to these doctors — isn't in question. "A pile of 1000 independent anecdotes of case-histories from professional clinicians that all corroborate the claim" just needs to be replaced with an equally-sized "pile of laboratory-condition-verified tests done in a way standardized enough to be aggregated as data and T-tested."

jdietrich 3y ago

It also doesn't really mean anything unless you're a strict mind-body dualist, because the brain is an organ. People with depression also have brain activity differences and are more likely to have elevated inflammatory markers. Having an autoimmune disorder increases your likelihood of being diagnosed with depression and vice-versa. There is no clear boundary between the biological and the psychological; emotion and cognition are biological processes in exactly the same way as digestion or respiration. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC9540243/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC9540243/ https://ajp.psychiatryonline.org/doi/10.1176/appi.ajp.2020.20060947 https://ajp.psychiatryonline.org/doi/10.1176/appi.ajp.2020.2... https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5338810/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5338810/