Just wanted to let you know, I'm taking part in some research at King's and I was really impressed with the research staff. I was also very happy to find out they have nothing to do with Dr Charles Wessely! They are a separate organisation, who got funding for CFS research. I've attached a list of the current research projects and I'm taking part in the immune system one.
@
Persimmon - you may be interested in this.
Study 1 looks okay. Dr Gerome Breen does a lot of research into genetics and mental illness. Doesn't look like he's ever looked at ME/CFS before, so probably not much of a vested interest in making it psychological. On the other hand, I wouldn't be surprised if he parrots the pro-CBT/GET beliefs of his colleagues in describing the disease or in the discussion, simply due to not being aware of how bad their research is.
Study 2 looks like it will be a quack fest. One of Lauren L Bryan's previous studies (not published yet) was looking at correlations between personality and CFS. The current one is looking for abnormal physical reactions to emotional and psychological stimuli, probably 100% in line with the belief that CFS patients problem is that we over-react to everything and that we imagine our symptoms.
Study 3 is likely to have a heavy bias in the direction of psychosocial causation of illness. It looks like Alice Russell is investigating immune activation as a possible cause of ME/CFS, but probably in the context of psychosocial stress causing the immune activation. Another reservation about this study is that there isn't a proper "normal" control group. Just CFS patients (referred to as having "chronic fatigue" at one point
) and patients with fatigue following treatment with interferon-alpha. Other publications by the co-author, Alessandra Borsini, seem to equate depression and fatigue with CFS, and heavily push the theory of psychosocial stress being an important part of causing both the reaction to the drug and in CFS.
The author of Study 4, Andres Herane Vives, is unknown regarding CFS, and has only published in Spanish previously. His supervisors for the project are Dr Anthony Cleare and Andrew Papadopoulus, who have worked with Wessely in many publications. They seem more focused on cortisol theories, but are quite happy with the stress/mood causation conclusions, as well as always advocating CBT/GET as the cure. Lot of stuff about how the problem is illness attributions, deconditioning, etc, with cortisol possibly explaining why some patients don't respond to CBT.
So Study 1 doesn't sound objectionable and even potentially useful, but I'd avoid the other three like the plague.