Attentional and interpretive bias towards illness-related information in chronic fatigue syndrome

[Sean]

may maintain

suggest negative illness representations,...

may reinforce negative illness beliefs.

Therefore, of course,

Cognitive processes have a role to play in the cognitive behavioural model of CFS.

This is a common feature of their claims and reasoning: they pass straight from possible to definite, without having to go through that messy evidence based proof step in between.

They have been doing it since I can remember, and are only getting worse.

••••••••••••••••••

Cognitive processes have a role to play in the cognitive behavioural model of CFS.

But apparently not in doing psychiatric research into CFS.

 

[Mark]

Are you thinking of this abstract: http://forums.phoenixrising.me/inde...commendation-cfs-an-update.45320/#post-737089

Whoops, yes, sorry about that, I seem to have conflated the two papers in my haste last night. That stuff about the disease burden in the other paper was particularly nasty, but I still think this abstract is the more disrespectful of the two. Both very nasty though.

 

[taniaaust1]

mark.. it didnt help that the other day one of my support workers told me that no one except her would want to work with me (re be my support worker). She probably didnt mean that badly, probably meant that its so difficult as i have so many different triggers and problems they need to deal with. But that comment that noone would want to work with me cause Im so difficult, made me feel really terrible. so that burden thing.. yeah like that. we are such a burden.. so hard to support, that no one wants to be helping us.

then the other day she told my other worker she was going to stop working with me cause it was too difficult (I think she thought I was out of hearing distance but my hearing is sensitive so i caught what was being said). I think she may of just been expressing her emotions at the time as so far she still is working with me. She though did a big sigh yesterday when she saw how much my dishes had built up.. yet again reminding me of what a burden I are.

and the other week she was actually swearing under her breath while doing my dishes over the mess here. I was in bed at time and once again i do think she thought I couldnt hear her.

 

[sarah darwins]

Whoops, yes, sorry about that, I seem to have conflated the two papers in my haste last night. That stuff about the disease burden in the other paper was particularly nasty, but I still think this abstract is the more disrespectful of the two. Both very nasty though.

I was slightly confused, but frankly the two abstracts are easily conflated. They're equally repellent.

 

[Mrs Sowester]

They got in a muddle poor loves, the title should read:
Attentional and interpretive bias towards evidence based medical research information in chronic fatigue syndrome patients
Somebody should correct the paper and send it back to them.

 

[Bob]

Are you thinking of this abstract: http://forums.phoenixrising.me/inde...commendation-cfs-an-update.45320/#post-737089

Whoops, yes, sorry about that, I seem to have conflated the two papers in my haste last night. That stuff about the disease burden in the other paper was particularly nasty, but I still think this abstract is the more disrespectful of the two. Both very nasty though.

The two papers seem to merge into one in my mind! Like a big pile of garbage.

 

[Valentijn]

This is being published in the British Journal of Health Psychology. Edited by Alison Wearden and David French.

Independent review is a complete joke to these people.

 

[leela]

They got in a muddle poor loves, the title should read:
Attentional and interpretive bias towards evidence based medical research information in chronic fatigue syndrome patients
Somebody should correct the paper and send it back to them.

Oh, @Mrs Sowester , I bow to you!
I do wish someone could send it back to them like that with a FTFY

 

[Snow Leopard]

This paper could be used as an example of what to avoid when writing a paper: confirmation bias and circular reasoning.

 

[Cheshire]

And as always no other disease control group. Science is supposed to reduce the possibility of bias, to verify if your hypothesis is correct and not due to another factor. They don't even try.

This is not scientific psychology, this is mere BS. Highshool students would do better.

 

[Woolie]

This is a particularly self-serving gem:

The aetiology of CFS has been hotly debated. However, the findings to date suggest a biopsychosocial model best explains the condition in terms of a complex interaction between biological, affective, behavioural, and cognitive factors (Moss-Morris, Deary, & Castell, 2013)

Paper goes on about the importance of using implicit measures to probe underlying illness cognitions in CFS. But the systematic review found only 8 studies that have done this. Actually, if you exclude studies that didn't even attempt to control for overall disability (it compared CFS to healthy controls only, no other illness control group), there were only two studies. Neither of these studies showed significant diffs between CFS and the illness control group.

I probably don't need to say to PR members that if you want to make inferences about the causal role of cognitive "biases" in the development/maintenance of CFS, you absolutely need to control for possible effects in the reverse direction (illness itself may increase bias). To do this, you need a control group with an illness you don't think is caused by such biases. Any study that does not do this can tell you nothing about causation.

But Chalder, Moss-Morris and friends, if you're reading this, can you please digest and take on board this simple and obvious point?

 

[CBS]

If we'd just stop having all these symptoms we could focus on something other than trying to get back to feeling better.

 

[Esther12]

This paper is really poor. Full of badly supported assertions. To me the paper does a pretty good job of showing what a worthless area of research this is, but they don't seem to see it that way.

This is how they describe the results from one recent Moss-Morris study:

CFS group had an attentional bias
towards threat words (p = .05)
but not pictures compared to HC.
This effect was more pronounced
for CFS participants with poor
executive attentional control
(p < .001)

More pronounced? This is a copy of the results from that study:

In the original paper they do say:

The CFS and control groups did not significantly differ in overall
attentional bias (i.e. averaged across both pictorial and linguistic
stimulus modalities and both stimulus exposure durations).

That's not exactly made clear in this review.

I'm not going to post up all the problems with what they've done.

They cite the PACE mediation analysis to claim:

Mediation analysis of behavioural interventions has shown that fear avoidance
beliefs about activity as well as catastrophic thinking habits are relevant for
patients with CFS and the perpetuation of symptoms (Chalder, Goldsmith, White, Sharpe,
&Pickles, 2015).

That paper did not show that.

Future research should compare
CFS with another illness groups with similar levels of disability.

To me, the fact that this was not done in studies assessing how people react to illness related words and images indicates that it is not worth giving more money to those working in this area.

This is the worst paper I've read in ages. There are loads of bold statements being made supported by rubbish references, eg:

The aetiology of CFS has been hotly debated. However, the findings to date suggest a
biopsychosocial model best explains the condition in terms of a complex interaction
between biological, affective, behavioural, and cognitive factors (Moss-Morris, Deary, &
Castell, 2013).

Moss-Morris, R., Deary, V., & Castell, B. (2013). Chapter 25 – Chronic fatigue syndrome. In P. B.
Michael & C. G. David (Eds.), Handbook of clinical neurology (Vol. 110, pp. 303–314).
Amsterdam, Netherlands: Elsevier Science.

Also, where has all this hot debating been happening? No reference provided for the claim. To me it looks like those trying to build careers upon a biopsychosocial model for CFS are doing all they can to avoid having to engage in any real debate with their critics.

I think Alicia Hughes is a young researcher, and she seems quite proudly indoctrinated into the low standards and quackery of biopsychosocial research already. I'm sure she's destined for great things.

 

[CBS]

The appropriate response might be:

Attentional and interpretive bias towards psychological factors by Bio-Psychosocial Researchers trying to make a career of "studying" depressed people labelled as having CFS (and CFS patients who mistook these BPS researchers for serious scientists).

 

[A.B.]

The rule is that the quality of the paper will be as low as needed to draw the conclusions they wanted. Reality resists your bullshit, only by distorting reality can bullshit be supported.

 

[Woolie]

Good point, @Esther12. That's a problem with these methods. Some people are good at inhibiting distractors in general, some aren't. And this may have nothing to do with "health related threat". If you don't control for group differences in overall susceptibility to distraction, you got nothing.

 

[Esther12]

@Woolie - we crossed posts and seemed to be saying the same things!

It's amazing that this was not a big thing in the discussion section:

Actually, if you exclude studies that didn't even attempt to control for overall disability (it compared CFS to healthy controls only, no other illness control group), there were only two studies. Neither of these studies showed significant diffs between CFS and the illness control group.

For the Chalder study they don't even mention the lack of difference between ill health groups in their summary of results.

This is one of those papers where I think "what is the point of it?" Are they going to try to use this to get more funding for rubbish research? Something to cite to let them pretend that there's objective evidence CFS patients should have their minds medicalised?

 

[Esther12]

Future research should compare
CFS with another illness groups with similar levels of disability.

Another thing with this, is that you would also want similar levels of stigma/mistreatment/quackery.

If you're assessing how CFS patients respond to words like 'lazy' and 'weak', and using differences in their responses from controls to try to justify the use of a CBT model, then the controls need to have had similar external experiences with those words.

 

[A.B.]

It would still be a pointless study. Suppose you had demonstrated that CFS patients spend more time processing illness related information. Now what? You still have no idea what this means. I'm sure the authors would shamelessly jump to conclusions but in truth nobody knows what this means. It could just mean that this group of patients spends more time thinking about the complexities of human health.

The authors would probably describe such a finding as "possibly supporting a psychosomatic model of causation" and then go on treating the mere possibility as fact from then onwards.

 

[Woolie]

Another thing with this, is that you would also want similar levels of stigma/mistreatment/quackery.

Also, an an ideal world, they should control for overall level of disability (most control groups used in these studies are just not as sick as us).