Petition against criteria the CDC are using for research

I thought I'd give this an extra thread to make it stand out. It's on the cohorts issue.

For those that don't know, the CDC used its empiric criteria (Reeves et al., 2005) in the negative Switzer XMRV study in Retrovirology.

There's a petition against it at:
http://www.ipetitions.com/petition/empirical_defn_and_cfs_research/ with some links to other information and critiques of the criteria.

These criteria have also been used in other "dodgy" CFS research e.g. the two CDC studies that linked CFS to childhood abuse.

In the Switzer study, there was one or more CFS patients who scored 100 on the SF-36 physical functioning scale.

That means they answered "No, not limited at all", to all of these questions (these are the questions for the physical functioning subscale: basically "Yes, Limited A Lot" gets you 0 points for that question; "Yes, Limited A Little" gets you 5 and "No, not limited at all" gets you 10 so scale is 0-100).

Reference:

This average score is higher than you generally see in CFS studies.

MFI-20 reduced activity question

Reduced Activity.
The questions are:

Each scale contains four items rated from 1 to 5 with the scale score of 1=completely true and the scale score of 5 = no, not true." (not this is reversed for questions 1 and 3 i.e. for them
5=completely true and the scale score of 1= no, not true.

A score of 4 makes one wonder does the person have "proper" CFS.
Of course using the MFI-20 reduced activity scale also has problems as a threshold.
If one scores >=10 (greater than or equal to 10), one qualifies as having fatigue. However, a "lazy" or depressed person might score that without necessarily having fatigue.

Thanks. We really need to get rid of this definition. It is stealing the CFS research money.

Signed. This reminds me of Garbag in = Garbage out (GI=GO)

2313 signatures so far. Started in April.

Those activity figures are amazing.