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where were their methodological concerns when that was published.
learn from the XMRV demise, in which many patients were allowed to use antiretroviral treatment
I agree that it's biased and unspeakable that PACE was not thrown out first hand but, is that a reason not to be cautious with any other study?
There are some responses to the letter here. I recommend the one by Jonathan Edwards who has experience with rituximab research.
http://www.plosone.org/annotation/l...notation/43f3e6a8-cf7d-4438-8b97-b21b9c31bf5c
There are some responses to the letter here. I recommend the one by Jonathan Edwards who has experience with rituximab research.
http://www.plosone.org/annotation/l...notation/43f3e6a8-cf7d-4438-8b97-b21b9c31bf5c
is that a reason not to be cautious with any other study?
It'd be worth somebody making that point if anyone wanted to have a go. You don't have to have lots of references in a reply - often they won't want any but you can always copy one or two of the references already there e.g. Fluge paper and/or PACE Trial paper to make it look like a referenced point. I've other things to be doing I'm afraid.Yup.
People here had raised concerns about the difficulty of genuine blinding with a drug like Rituximab and the danger of placebo affects distorting results, the difficulty of assessing improvements, etc, etc. Some researchers only seem interested in making these sorts of criticisms of non-psychiatric CFS work, while trying to ignore the problems with research like PACE. Their talk of the needing a theoretical justification is particularly amusing in light of the way research undermining the role of both deconditioning and fear of activity as perpetuating factors in CFS was addressed in the Lancet's accompanying PACE editorial.
Another point it might be worth mentioning on that thread. Anyway, I should probably stop making such suggestions. I'm just trying to point out that people can comment directly if they want.Many? Handful is more the word. Some. If they sat tight, I bet you could fit them all into a minibus. And the numbers of CFS sufferers are more than the Ohio Stadium times ten, and that's just in US.learn from the XMRV demise, in which many patients were allowed to use antiretroviral treatment
I hope they will find out why the reaction was like this, but i guess this is also a point against a placebo effect having caused the observed results. I don't think there's a 6 to 10 months delayed placebo effect.It is not so much the finding that a form of immunotherapy may work, but rather the peculiar late response (between 6 10 months). Such a late response has not been seen in other conditions in which RTX works.
You could have a point. At the same time, in this case, they only got two dosages close together; it could be the case that a different regime might produce better results.The cautions in that letter make perfect sense, RTX presents significant immediate health risks, and ME/CFS patients need to be careful not to draw premature conclusions as has happened before. However, given the way pharmaceutical medicine works today, I think there is an even greater long-term risk if premature conclusions are drawn. Those who want ME/CFS to just go away could point to RTX therapy and say 'there is already a treatment, we know what causes CFS' and then slow funding for other research directions, considering our case to be closed. But of course the improvement on RTX was not very dramatic in most of the cases, only a few total remissions, which puts RTX therapy in the same category as several other ME/CFS therapies.