Dubbo strikes me as a chest of gold lying at the feet of researchers that they bizarrely ignore while looking into the distance to find CFS treasure....
Basically the Dubbo studies showed that what predicted whether or not a patient would go on to develop CFS was the severity of their inital acute infection. And the figures are truly extraordinary: patients with an initial acute infection that was severe had an Odds Ratio of over 200 of going on to develop CFS (this figure comes from a later related paper about
Hypervigilance).
To put that into persepctive, a recent paper by psychologist Rona Moss-Morris got very excited about an Odds Ratio of just 1.9 for a link between an All Or Nothing (boom and bust) behaviour by patients and going on to develop CFS after developing Infectious Mononucleosis (one of the same infections studied in the Dubbo trial).
So, when it comes to predicting the risk of getting CFS after certain infections such as Infection Mononucleosis (usually caused by EBV) the Odds Ratios are:
Severity of Initial infection = over 200
All or Nothing/Boom &Bust patient behaviour = 1.9
You decide who is on to something impportant.
OK, that's it from me: Happy Christmas one and all