White et al wrote that "The data has been entered and checked during the course of the trial in a customised Microsoft Access [78] database. Once the database is locked, the data will be transferred into Stata". (1)
The FOIA stipulates that public bodies should "provide advice and assistance, so far as it would be reasonable to expect the authority to do so, to persons who propose to make, or have made, requests for information to it." (2)
Dr Sheridan could ask QMUL for assistance in formulating a query to execute against the Stata file holding the trial data to identify the required subset and then transfer this to a comma separated value file (i.e. a spreadsheet file.) QMUL's IT services offer support for "our enterprise applications such as Guassian, Stata and Matlab"(3), and given the simplicity of the task, a competent user of Stata could export the data in a matter of minutes.
I've never used Stata, but after a bit of googling, the query would look something like the following (and obviously I've had to guess at the label of each data-column).
First, filter the data to keep the details only of the participants who recovered:
``(keep if (
CFQ_likert_52_weeks <= 18
& SF36PF_52_weeks >= 60
& CGI <= 2
& CDC_criteria_met_52_weeks == 'No'
& Oxford_criteria_met_52_weeks == 'No'
& London_ME_criteria_met_52_weeks == 'No'))``
Second, save the filtered data in memory:
``save part``
Finally, use the "outsheet" command to output the trial arm, the 6 minute walking distance at baseline and the 6 minute walking distance at 52 weeks to a CSV file called "six_minute_walk_data_for_recovered.csv", which could be emailed to Dr Sheridan who could then open it in Excel or OpenOffice Calc.
``outsheet trial_arm 6_min_walk_baseline 6_min_walk_52_weeks using six_minute_walk_data_for_recovered.csv , comma``
No personally identifiable data would be released, and QMUL couldn't argue that it would take more than 18 hours to complete.
It's also worth bearing in mind that, when evaluating the claim that it would take more than 18 hours to fulfil the request, only 87 people recovered according to the post-hoc criteria, and that White et al must have identified this small group of participants (and have tabulated their Patient Identification Numbers) before writing "Recovery from chronic fatigue syndrome after treatments given in the PACE trial." (4)
(1) A randomised trial of adaptive pacing therapy, cognitive behaviour therapy, graded exercise, and specialist medical care for chronic fatigue syndrome (PACE): statistical analysis plan
Trials 2013, 14:386 doi:10.1186/1745-6215-14-386
(2)
http://ico.org.uk/~/media/documents...eness_guidance_23_-_advice_and_assistance.pdf
(3)
http://www.its.qmul.ac.uk/research/
(4) Recovery from chronic fatigue syndrome after treatments given in the PACE trial.
White PD1, Goldsmith K, Johnson AL, Chalder T, Sharpe M.
Psychol Med. 2013 Oct;43(10):2227-35. doi: 10.1017/S0033291713000020.
