Category: Science

Jennie Spotila Reports on NIH ME/CFS Spending in 2015

Jennie Spotila Reports on NIH ME/CFS Spending in 2015 Jennie Spotila has written another detailed analysis on NIH spending on ME/CFS research. On a positive note, spending on ME/CFS grants increased to $6,470,000 in 2015, which was a 20% increase over fiscal year 2014 and, “for the first time since at least 2009, there were no

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Dr Nath on ACT UP and patient involvement in ME/CFS research

At Tuesday’s CDC Grand Rounds Wilhelmina Jenkins, a long-time ME/CFS advocate, asked Dr. Avindra Nath, the PI of the NIH intramural study, a question about the planned Patient Advisory Committee mentioned in his presentation and about RFAs. We thought patients and allies may find a video and transcript of the question and Dr Nath’s response

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Transcripts and Slides from Dr Nath's talk on NIH study

Update: The video of Dr Nath’s talk is now available on youtube. Dr Avindra Nath, Chief of the Section of Infections of the Nervous System at NINDS, gave a presentation on February 16 at CDC Grand Rounds going which went into detail on NIH’s new intramural ME/CFS study. The recording should be up on February 18 at http://www.cdc.gov/cdcgrandrounds/, but

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CDC Grand Rounds on ME/CFS Tuesday

ME/CFS is going to be the topic for CDC’s monthly Grand Rounds this Tuesday at 1 pm ET. The title of the session is “Chronic Fatigue Syndrome: Advancing Research and Clinical Education.” The presenters will be Anthony Komaroff (Harvard Medical Center), Elizabeth Unger (Chief of CDC’s Chronic Viral Diseases Branch), Charles Lapp (Hunter-Hopkins Center, P.A.), and Avindra

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Positive Answers to Initial Questions re NIH Clinical Center Protocol

Editor’s note: This is a clarification on the NIH’s earlier, accidental release of the intramural study protocol, which listed the Reeves definition as the sole definition of the new study. Robert and Courtney’s summary of their conversation has been confirmed by multiple sources within the patient community, including #MEAction. Robert and I had a well-timed

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Case Study: "Brain Fog" in CFS can be seen in qEEG/Loreta

Marcie Zinn, Mark Zinn, and Leonard Jason of DePaul University published a case study this week that details how qEEGs can clearly show the dysregulation that occurs in the brains of CFS patients. The case study is of a 43-year old man with CFS (diagnosed by his doctor using the DePaul Symptom Questionnaire and meeting the Canadian Clinical Case definition).

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PACE: Objections, Challenges & Beliefs

I am writing this piece to offer Dorothy Bishop & Stephan Lewandowsky some patient perspective on their joint piece in Nature : “Research integrity: Don’t let transparency damage science”. Specifically, I would like to add some context to this line in particular:- “When people object to science because it challenges their beliefs or jeopardizes their interests, they are rarely committed to informed debate.”

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James Coyne at Belfast Castle: PACE a “wasteful train wreck of a study”

Professor James Coyne told a packed audience at Belfast Castle in Northern Ireland on Sunday that the PACE trial was “bad science” that was “being badly misrepresented by the investigators”, resulting in “clear harm to patients”. The PACE authors had, he said, changed their study endpoints after peeking at the data and had suppressed analyses

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NIH Grant Reviewers in 2015

Thank you to Jennifer Spotila for giving us permission to reprint her article and for all of her great investigative work. The original post can be found on her blog at http://www.occupycfs.com/. NIH: Who Reviewed Grants in 2015 In order to get NIH funding, a researcher has to succeed in several levels of application review. A persistent controversy

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