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(PACE Trial) Does the Heterogeneity of Chronic Fatigue Syndrome Moderate the Response

Dolphin

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Does the Heterogeneity of Chronic Fatigue Syndrome Moderate the Response

[Apologies - I can't change the heading - this isn't to do with PACE. If a moderator or admin could correct the subject line, it'd be great.]

Vol. 80, No. 6, 2011
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http://content.karger.com/ProdukteD...ikelNr=327582&Ausgabe=255497&ProduktNr=223864

Regular Article

Does the Heterogeneity of Chronic Fatigue Syndrome Moderate the Response to Cognitive Behaviour Therapy? An Exploratory Study

Matteo Cella a, b, Trudie Chalder a, Peter D. White c

aDepartment of Psychological Medicine, Institute of Psychiatry, Kings College London, bDepartment of Clinical, Educational and Health Psychology, University College London, and cCenter for Psychiatry, Wolfson Institute of Preventive Medicine, Barts and the London School of Medicine, Queen Mary University, London, UK


Address of Corresponding Author

Psychother Psychosom 2011;80:353-358 (DOI: 10.1159/000327582)


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Key Words

Chronic fatigue syndrome
Cognitive behaviour therapy

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Abstract*

Background:

Chronic fatigue syndrome (CFS) is a heterogeneous condition.

A few studies have shown that some independent factors predict outcomes after cognitive behaviour therapy (CBT).

Two recent systematic reviews suggest that heterogeneity may moderate treatment outcomes.

However, no study has explored whether subgroups of CFS predict response to treatment.

Methods:

We used both latent class analysis (LCA) and latent class regression
(LCR) to clarify the relationship between subgroups of CFS patients (n = 236), diagnosed using the Oxford diagnostic criteria, and the response to CBT.

We measured symptoms, demographics, mood, and cognitive and behavioural responses to illness to define subgroups.

Results:

We found 5 latent classes by LCA, which did not differ in the direction of their response to CBT, with all classes showing improvement.

In contrast, an exploratory LCR identified 4 latent classes, 1 of which predicted a poor response to CBT, whereas the other 3 predicted a good outcome, accounting for more than 70% of the patients.

The negative outcome class was defined by weight fluctuations and physical shakiness, anxiety, pain and being focused on symptoms.

Conclusions:

CBT should be offered to all classes of patients with CFS, when defined by these measures.

It may be possible to predict a minority group with a negative outcome, but this exploratory work needs replication.

Copyright 2011 S. Karger AG, Basel


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Author Contacts

Matteo Cella
Kings College London, Institute of Psychiatry, Department of Psychological Medicine Weston Education Centre, Cutcombe Rd London SE5 9RJ (UK) Tel. +44 20 3228 3191, E-Mail matteo.cella@kcl.ac.uk


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Article Information

Received: November 11, 2010
Accepted after revision: March 13, 2011
Published online: August 6, 2011
Number of Print Pages : 6
Number of Figures : 2, Number of Tables : 2, Number of References : 48

* I've given each sentence its own paragraph
 

oceanblue

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Thanks, Dolphin, that look interesting. My guess is they were expecting to find factors predicting response, particularly given that PACE was explicity based on a psychological model of the illness. And this is remarkably reasonable of them:
It may be possible to predict a minority group with a negative outcome, but this exploratory work needs replication.
Will try to source a copy of the paper.
 

Dolphin

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And this is remarkably reasonable of them:
It may be possible to predict a minority group with a negative outcome, but this exploratory work needs replication.
But they say just before it:
CBT should be offered to all classes of patients with CFS, when defined by these measures
which rather undoes any admission.

I'm not sure I'm going to know enough about LCA or LCR to know which is "better" but we'll see how things go, I certainly plan to read it.
 

oceanblue

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But they say just before it:
"CBT should be offered to all classes of patients with CFS, when defined by these measures "
which rather undoes any admission.
I took that as supporting it - they are saying they found nothing that differentiates patients so have no grounds to rule any patients in or out.
 

Dolphin

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I took that as supporting it - they are saying they found nothing that differentiates patients so have no grounds to rule any patients in or out.
I took that to refer to the LCA where all were positive.
I'm hopeful I'll have a better idea when I see the full paper (and perhaps do a little reading); it looks like it might be something a drug company would have trouble saying i.e. if they found a group that had a negative response using a certain analysis.
 

Dolphin

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Anyone have the Cognitive Behavioural Response Questionnaire?

I've read the paper now. First a preliminary comment/question:

Cognitive Behavioural Response Questionnaire
The Cognitive Behavioural Response Questionnaire [31] is a self-rated questionnaire designed to measure patients cognitive and behavioural responses to illness. Items are rated on a 5-point Likert scale ranging from strongly disagree to strongly agree. Four cognitive and 2 behavioural subscales can be derived: catastrophising, damaging beliefs, symptom focusing, embarrassment avoidance, all-or-nothing behaviour and avoidance/resting [31, 32] .

31 Moss-Morris RE, Chalder T: Illness representations: where to from here? 16th Conf Eur Health Psychol Soc, Kos, 2003.
32 Skerrett TN, Moss-Morris R: Fatigue and social impairment in multiple sclerosis: the role of patients cognitive and behavioral responses to their symptoms. J Psychosom Res 2006; 61: 587593.

Has anyone got this questionnaire? I often find the concept of symptom focusing in CFS is not well-defined. For example, if one has a symptom which is not an "approved" CFS symptom or say that such a symptom bothers you, that is called symptom focusing.

It could be that what they really found was people who had more symptoms had a poor response.
 

Dolphin

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This is really two separate studies. I'm afraid my suspicious mind makes me wonder whether they have deliberately published like this to confuse peopl as most people are not going to feel they are that knowledgeable about latent class analysis and latent class regression.

The first analysis is about latent class analysis. This is about breaking up a group into subgroups based on the data one has collected. This was just done on the baseline data so doesn't have really anything to do with CBT.

In CFS, it is very important to measure interesting CFS data. What I have seen happen with CDC data on the broad empiric criteria (the current study uses the Oxford criteria) is that when one measures body mass index and various measures that could be connected to body mass index/being overweight, what one ends up at are classes like obese and non-obese. It may be true that these are classes but these are not necessarily CFS groups with different causes for their illness: they are not really interesting subgroups of CFS.

The second analysis looked at the response to CBT on one outcome measure, the Chalder Fatigue Questionnaire (Likert scoring i.e. 0-33). This led to 4 separate classes.

In the 4-class solution, class 1 described 27% of the
CFS patients, class 2 26%, class 3 25% and class 4 22%.
The median fatigue scale improvement for the 4 classes
after CBT was: 1 (IQR = 5 to +3) for class 1; +7 (IQR =
212) for class 2; +4 (IQR = 010) for class 3, and +7
(IQR = 310) for class 4 ( fig. 2 ). Unstandardised regression
coefficients representing the contribution of each of
the classes to explain the dependent variable were: 4.92
for class 1, 4.41 for class 2, 5.75 for class 3 and 5.33 for class
4. These coefficients show the direction and strength of
the prediction that a particular class had on outcome.

Beta parameters for some of the predictors entered
in the LCR models are presented in table 2 . Patients in
class 1, which was associated with poor CBT outcomes,
reported more frequent weight fluctuation, physical
shakiness and pain and had higher anxiety and symptom
focusing scores compared to the other classes.

I find it disappointing that they do not give data on the 38 predictors. There could be other interesting information there e.g. they measured 27 symptoms.

There conclusion is fair:
Studies investigating the effects of heterogeneity in moderating treatment response to CBT are novel and promising. We are aware of only one other recent study
applying a similar method to investigate treatment response in eating disorders [44] . Variable response to treatment is commonly reported in intervention studies; however, randomised controlled trials have as their main objective the investigation of treatment effectiveness leaving the question of whom the treatment is effective for largely unanswered. Whether influenced by patients heterogeneous clinical characteristics, study entry criteria, the role of intervention provider, centre-specific characteristics, co-therapies or study design, outcome variability is a critical aspect to consider. Understanding heterogeneity may be the key to understand why a treatment that is helpful for many may be ineffective in some and even harmful to others [45, 46] . This could be particularly true for CFS and provide some answers to the many controversies in relation to diagnostic criteria and intervention effectiveness [47] . The use of LCA and LCR in relation to treatment outcome has the potential to improve treatment effectiveness by identifying potentially modifiable and unique sets of characteristics which may be more clinically valid and have a better response to different treatments. Further, investigation of symptom heterogeneity can generate empirically based alternative categories of patients that can be used in controlled studies to evaluate intervention effectiveness [48] .

I don't know how they can justify this conclusion in the abstract:
CBT should be offered to all classes of patients with CFS, when defined by these measures.

If one found people who had an adverse drug reaction, the relevant data is requires use of the outcome data: if there is some group that looks like it can be defined that has a bad reaction, that is relevant; one doesn't go on general subgroups that are independent of the treatment (i.e. subgroups one can find whether they have the treatment or not).
 

Dolphin

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We don't get much data but it looks like a lot of the individuals in class 4 (of the latent class regression analysis) scored less than 11 on the Chalder Fatigue Questionnaire as the median value is 11 (obtained by measuring the figure which is pretty spread out so any small measurement errors wouldn't alter this much).

They could be said to be characterised by higher depression scores, lower anxiety scores and low "symptom focusing" from Table 2. I view scores of under 11 and especially under 10 as artificial scores (remember there will be a spread around any median score). Actually I think scores of 0 on any item (question) is generally likely to be artificial - one doesn't need to score less than 11 to get a 0 on one item: if one scores 2 or more on other items, it is possible (and it seems quite likely that people with a CFS diagnosis would score 2+ on some items).
 

oceanblue

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I don't know how they can justify this conclusion in the abstract:
"CBT should be offered to all classes of patients with CFS, when defined by these measures."

If one found people who had an adverse drug reaction, the relevant data is requires use of the outcome data: if there is some group that looks like it can be defined that has a bad reaction, that is relevant; one doesn't go on general subgroups that are independent of the treatment (i.e. subgroups one can find whether they have the treatment or not).
Thanks for all the analysis.

Harms
Their 'let 'em all have it' conclusion might be because the poor outcome group had a median change of -1 on CFQ, which they probably classified as neutral rather than harmful.

However, using the PACE formula for a clinically meaningful difference of 0.5SD, we could say that a change in CFQ of -4 or more represents harm (0.5 SD=3.6). On this basis, well over 25% of the 'poor outcome' group (Group 1) were 'harmed' by the treatment (since the IQR for change is -5 to +3). This probably equates to around 10% of all patients in the study.

Unreliable findings
Another reason for their conclusion could be their observation that their findings need replication (how refreshingly honest). As the authors have mentioned, lots of people have used techniques like LCA to identify sub-groups in CFS patients and none of them find the same groups.

Adding to my suspicion of the Latent Class Regression grouping is the finding that the most important paramater in defining different groups is 'weight fluctuations' - far more important than factors like symptom focusing or avoidance/resting. Huh? When has anyone ever mentioned weight fluctuations as such an important factor in CFS? The authors don't even comment on this strange finding.

I'm assuming weight fluctuations is a symptom, since BMI wasn't measured, and maybe weight fluctuations correlates strongly with BMI but we don't know. If it is just a proxy for BMI then, as you suggest, they may have just picked out a sub-group who are chronically fatigued but don't have ME, as seems to have hapened in studies using the empirical criteria.
 

Dolphin

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Thanks for all the analysis.

Harms
Their 'let 'em all have it' conclusion might be because the poor outcome group had a median change of -1 on CFQ, which they probably classified as neutral rather than harmful.
Ok, but they don't give any explicit reason in the text. Abstracts are supposed to summarise what the text says and comments there should be backed up. Of course, if they give a reason in the text people might have seen through it.

However, using the PACE formula for a clinically meaningful difference of 0.5SD, we could say that a change in CFQ of -4 or more represents harm (0.5 SD=3.6). On this basis, well over 25% of the 'poor outcome' group (Group 1) were 'harmed' by the treatment (since the IQR for change is -5 to +3). This probably equates to around 10% of all patients in the study.
Well spotted. Good analysis.

Unreliable findings
Another reason for their conclusion could be their observation that their findings need replication (how refreshingly honest). As the authors have mentioned, lots of people have used techniques like LCA to identify sub-groups in CFS patients and none of them find the same groups.

Adding to my suspicion of the Latent Class Regression grouping is the finding that the most important paramater in defining different groups is 'weight fluctuations' - far more important than factors like symptom focusing or avoidance/resting. Huh? When has anyone ever mentioned weight fluctuations as such an important factor in CFS? The authors don't even comment on this strange finding.

I'm assuming weight fluctuations is a symptom, since BMI wasn't measured, and maybe weight fluctuations correlates strongly with BMI but we don't know. If it is just a proxy for BMI then, as you suggest, they may have just picked out a sub-group who are chronically fatigued but don't have ME, as seems to have hapened in studies using the empirical criteria.
I'm still not 100% sure we have definitely seen all the factors relevant for class 1 in the LCR - we only get to see 10 out of the 38: the others perhaps might not come up if they were not that different for the some of the classes (I'm afraid my statistics knowledge is not sufficient currently to know exactly what could be at play - I wish they had just given all 38 they had looked at).

I must not have been clear if I gave the impression I thought weight fluctuations was to do with obesity - I didn't intend in that post to talk about weight fluctuations at all as I hadn't thought it through (I'm also not sure how they defined it).

My point about obesity was from looking at the CDC studies on their broadly defined cohort (empiric criteria, Reeves et al. 2005 i.e. I think most don't have anything close to ME/CFS). They used some objective measures - I think they were from when they were doing the exclusions. So there were some groups classed by obesity - but that was really because the measures they were using were factors associated with obesity (can't remember exact ones - but probably things like blood sugar, cholesterol, etc.). My point is that they don't give interesting information on ME/CFS heterogeneity in my view - the sort that might persuade a doctor to give one patient an antiviral (say), another a drug to suppress the immune system and a third some drug that worked on the central nervous system (or whatever).

Also, to clarify: while looking at patients at baseline (LCA) has been used before and because of what they the measures they used, I'm not sure it has that much value doesn't mean I necessarily think LCR has no value. For example, one might find that people for whom a particular drug/treatment isn't suitable e.g. who are over 60 and overweight (or have kidney problems or liver problems or whatever - with a huge amount of the variables having no value): not necessarily a proper CFS subgroup (or something that would show up on a LCA) but still useful in knowing who not to give a treatment to. And with CFS, such information I think could give useful information e.g. I'd imagine if one looked at who responded very well to GET and became a lot better objectively and those where there wasn't a huge change and indeed with some getting worse, that might be interesting - but it might not show up if the analysis had been restricted to LCA where other factors might "overpower" the differences.

Basically, I think one has to be careful with a LCA as it could be drowned out with a lot of "noise" - irrelevant variables. LCR analysis looks like it could be more interesting esp. if all the data is presented, ideally objective outcome measures are used and the treatments could give interesting information
(Aside: I think a LCR on GET might give better information than CBT in CFS as CBT can be a mish-mash of different treatments and people may improve for other reasons - although that might be more important if subjective measures are used).

Just to repeat, as I mention LCR might not give a proper CFS subgroup e.g. if people with kidney problems (for example) couldn't cope with a drug/did badly on a drug, it might not give information about subgroups with the condition. However, with broadly defined CFS, LCR on GET-type treatments would seem like it has the potential to give some information.

Anyway, that's possibly the first paper on LCR I've seen anywhere so I'm no expert.
 

oceanblue

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Ok, but they don't give any explicit reason in the text. Abstracts are supposed to summarise what the text says and comments there should be backed up.

My point about obesity was from looking at the CDC studies on their broadly defined cohort (empiric criteria, Reeves et al. 2005 i.e. I think most don't have anything close to ME/CFS). They used some objective measures - I think they were from when they were doing the exclusions. So there were some groups classed by obesity - but that was really because the measures they were using were factors associated with obesity (can't remember exact ones - but probably things like blood sugar, cholesterol, etc.). My point is that they don't give interesting information on ME/CFS heterogeneity in my view - the sort that might persuade a doctor to give one patient an antiviral (say), another a drug to suppress the immune system and a third some drug that worked on the central nervous system (or whatever).

Also, to clarify: while looking at patients at baseline (LCA) has been used before and because of what they the measures they used, I'm not sure it has that much value doesn't mean I necessarily think LCR has no value. For example, one might find that people for whom a particular drug/treatment isn't suitable e.g. who are over 60 and overweight (or have kidney problems or liver problems or whatever - with a huge amount of the variables having no value): not necessarily a proper CFS subgroup (or something that would show up on a LCA) but still useful in knowing who not to give a treatment to. And with CFS, such information I think could give useful information e.g. I'd imagine if one looked at who responded very well to GET and became a lot better objectively and those where there wasn't a huge change and indeed with some getting worse, that might be interesting - but it might not show up if the analysis had been restricted to LCA where other factors might "overpower" the differences.

Basically, I think one has to be careful with a LCA as it could be drowned out with a lot of "noise" - irrelevant variables. LCR analysis looks like it could be more interesting esp. if all the data is presented, ideally objective outcome measures are used and the treatments could give interesting information
(Aside: I think a LCR on GET might give better information than CBT in CFS as CBT can be a mish-mash of different treatments and people may improve for other reasons - although that might be more important if subjective measures are used).

Just to repeat, as I mention LCR might not give a proper CFS subgroup e.g. if people with kidney problems (for example) couldn't cope with a drug/did badly on a drug, it might not give information about subgroups with the condition. However, with broadly defined CFS, LCR on GET-type treatments would seem like it has the potential to give some information.

Anyway, that's possibly the first paper on LCR I've seen anywhere so I'm no expert.
Yes, the abstract didn't tally with the paper in a few places.

As I understand it LCR is a close cousin of LCA, adding the depenedent variable (outcome) alongside all the things that go into LCA. As Latent Class analysis gives such unreliable results, i don't trust those for LCR either, though the principle is good. Or to put it another way, I don't think the underlying 'sub-groups' are robust/meaningfull enough, at least not based on the parameters they are using and so are unlikely to give useful predictions. If they could replicate the same 4 LCR groups on an independent sample of patients, then that would then be compelling.

I also can't work out why they bother with groups at all. If you are using many parameters (38 in this case) to predict outcome, why not do it at an indivdual level? They are effectively using:
1. Individual patient Paramaters-> determine which sub-group
2. Base prediction on subgroup (all patients in group get same prediction)

You made an interesting point about why obesity has come out as a factor in previous LCA studies.

Surely paramaters->predict outcome would be a simpler way of doing it.

Interesting point you made about why
 

Dolphin

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Yes, the abstract didn't tally with the paper in a few places.

As I understand it LCR is a close cousin of LCA, adding the depenedent variable (outcome) alongside all the things that go into LCA. As Latent Class analysis gives such unreliable results, i don't trust those for LCR either, though the principle is good. Or to put it another way, I don't think the underlying 'sub-groups' are robust/meaningfull enough, at least not based on the parameters they are using and so are unlikely to give useful predictions. If they could replicate the same 4 LCR groups on an independent sample of patients, then that would then be compelling.

I also can't work out why they bother with groups at all. If you are using many parameters (38 in this case) to predict outcome, why not do it at an indivdual level? They are effectively using:
1. Individual patient Paramaters-> determine which sub-group
2. Base prediction on subgroup (all patients in group get same prediction)

Surely paramaters->predict outcome would be a simpler way of doing it.

You made an interesting point about why obesity has come out as a factor in previous LCA studies.
Thanks for your thoughts and reading through my piece above which was longer than I intended and could probably have been more concise.

I agree that testing results would be useful. Indeed with big enough samples (this was quite big) as you probably know, some researchers divide up the sample and use (say) the last third to test the model.

Interesting point you make (although I'm not sure I fully understand it and of course in general I'm out of my depth talking about this). What a lot of papers I see (not on LCR) do is report on individual factors/correlations initially with a table, which wasn't done here. This would be a correlation with change score here. Then they would use reduction techniques to see if there are a few overall independent factors that could be used for everyone which I think is what you are saying. Sometimes I think researchers dichotomise the scores (top half of scores and bottom half of scores) and calculate a discriminant function with weightings for variables. I don't know enough to know if there are advantages in what they did e.g. why would somebody want to know whether a person was in class 2 or 3. It would seem to make more sense if there was more than one outcome measure e.g. class 2 did well on outcome measure A, class 3 didn't do as well on outcome measure A but did well on outcome measure B.

One interesting overall point is that LCR class 1 had the worst initial CFQ scores.

I have a feeling given when it was published and that Peter White doesn't usually publish CBT papers that this may be referred to in the PACE Trial analysis and it may have been advantageous to publish in this order with the particular contents of this paper (just as it was to publish the normative Chalder Fatigue Questionnaire scores last year) - but maybe I'm getting too suspicious.
 

oceanblue

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I agree that testing results would be useful. Indeed with big enough samples (this was quite big) as you probably know, some researchers divide up the sample and use (say) the last third to test the model.

Interesting point you make (although I'm not sure I fully understand it and of course in general I'm out of my depth talking about this). What a lot of papers I see (not on LCR) do is report on individual factors/correlations initially with a table, which wasn't done here. This would be a correlation with change score here. Then they would use reduction techniques to see if there are a few overall independent factors that could be used for everyone which I think is what you are saying. Sometimes I think researchers dichotomise the scores (top half of scores and bottom half of scores) and calculate a discriminant function with weightings for variables. I don't know enough to know if there are advantages in what they did e.g. why would somebody want to know whether a person was in class 2 or 3. It would seem to make more sense if there was more than one outcome measure e.g. class 2 did well on outcome measure A, class 3 didn't do as well on outcome measure A but did well on outcome measure B.

One interesting overall point is that LCR class 1 had the worst initial CFQ scores.
Think some bits were missing from my original post for some reason, though it may not have made sense even in it's full form :D.

An exploratory/confirmatory approach in this study, as you suggest, could have helped demonstrate the LCR sub-groups are real, and not yet another unreproducible quirk.

I found the results difficult too. Apparently LCR is a form of Structural Equation Modelling and I haven't had the strength to tackle that section of my Biostatistics textbook yet... What struch me, though, was the apparent strength of some many factors as predictors. Even pain, ranked 25/38 as a predictor accoriding to the Wald statistic, had p<0.001. If this is anything to go by, then when PACE data is analysed they will find many powerful predictors of outcome. Here they will be looking at the ability of individual parameters to predict outcome (rather than group membership), which should make interpretation easier.
 

Dolphin

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Think some bits were missing from my original post for some reason, though it may not have made sense even in it's full form :D.

An exploratory/confirmatory approach in this study, as you suggest, could have helped demonstrate the LCR sub-groups are real, and not yet another unreproducible quirk.

I found the results difficult too. Apparently LCR is a form of Structural Equation Modelling and I haven't had the strength to tackle that section of my Biostatistics textbook yet... What struch me, though, was the apparent strength of some many factors as predictors. Even pain, ranked 25/38 as a predictor accoriding to the Wald statistic, had p<0.001. If this is anything to go by, then when PACE data is analysed they will find many powerful predictors of outcome. Here they will be looking at the ability of individual parameters to predict outcome (rather than group membership), which should make interpretation easier.
I missed the rankings - I must read up more on statistics (it is in my to do list and I have bought some books). Well spotted:
The Wald statistic was used to indicate the discriminative propriety of each predictor, higher scores indicating better discriminative proprieties.
and the change in fatigue score was the dependent variable.

Also, earlier I said dichotomise (used in some other analyses) would mean divide half/half but of course, it doesn't have to be done like that - it could be, for example, dividing it up so any decreases are one group with the rest being the other.
 

oceanblue

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Also, earlier I said dichotomise (used in some other analyses) would mean divide half/half but of course, it doesn't have to be done like that - it could be, for example, dividing it up so any decreases are one group with the rest being the other.
Not sure if they dichotomised here: apparently LCR can work with continous variables to predict a categorical outcome (group membership) so who knows what's going on. How is it that such a soft discipline as psychology uses such impenetrably difficult statistics?
 

Dolphin

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Not sure if they dichotomised here: apparently LCR can work with continous variables to predict a categorical outcome (group membership) so who knows what's going on. How is it that such a soft discipline as psychology uses such impenetrably difficult statistics?
No, I don't believe they dichotomised, it was just mentioned earlier when I was mentioning some of the ways outcomes could be analysed - if that had been done, one would have had two groups and one could have looked at the predictors more clearly for disimprovement. That would not have been the same analysis as looking at correlations with change.
 

oceanblue

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No, I don't believe they dichotomised, it was just mentioned earlier when I was mentioning some of the ways outcomes could be analysed - if that had been done, one would have had two groups and one could have looked at the predictors more clearly for disimprovement. That would not have been the same analysis as looking at correlations with change.
Ah, I see what you mean.