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This study might be old news and or meaningless but figured someone might get something from it:

Wishful

Senior Member
Messages
5,740
Location
Alberta
The first question that popped into my mind on reading it is: "Might they just be measuring the metabolic changes from feeling really crappy?" Feeling lousy and doing less physical and mental activities should change some metabolic markers.

The paper did make me search for 'cuminaldehyde purine', which led to another paper showing that cuminaldehyde has antidiabetic properties, and thus might affect purine metabolism, which could maybe possibly (just a wild guess) be how it blocked my PEM.
 

wabi-sabi

Senior Member
Messages
1,484
Location
small town midwest
It is an observational study, meaning it cannot assign cause and effect. That's not a slam against this study- it's just a statement about experimental design and what conclusions you can logically draw. When you don't know much about a phenomenon an observational study is the way to go so you can hoover up as much data as possible.

In this case, it looks like they've hoovered up some good stuff! They used objective measures- all that serum biochemistry and urine samples to measure- to describe PEM. These measured changes also align with other research that's been done on ME/CFS suggesting there's replicability going on. A good sign in research that you've found a real effect! ME/CFS patients were identified using Canadian guidelines (not Fukuda!) so we think that they really had ME/CFS. I would like to see more demographic info on the participants. They mentioned they gave a depression questionnaire, but I couldn't find anywhere those results were included. Maybe I missed that though-brain issues, you know.