PACE Trial and PACE Trial Protocol

Outstanding!

So as for their latest study, I've only seen the abstract, and of course we all know one should never just judge by the abstract, one should read the whole paper in order to get a proper sense of the full horror of it, but if anybody has yet done so, and recovered from any resulting anxiety or depression, is my interpretation of their findings correct? Or am I missing something earth-shatteringly useful?

- roughly half of the PACE trial participants were suffering from an anxiety disorder, a depressive disorder, or both (though whether they also had ME is, of course, another question).

- this is not unexpected, because previous research has shown that if you use the Oxford Criteria to define "CFS/ME", large numbers of patients have anxiety and depression.

- the patients with anxiety disorders tended to be more anxious about their health.

- the patients with depressive disorders tended to be more embarrassed and didn't do much.


This does not seem exactly ground-breaking news to set the ME research world alight, but I'm probably missing something - did they bury away their most exciting findings in the paper itself, and not mention them in the abstract?

Be aware, that this is a tertiary care study and these sorts of figures are common in tertiary care of individuals with other chronic diseases as well.

Those who agree to take part in a study like PACE are more likely to have co-morbid disorders. It isn't rocket science.

Given these results, I wonder whether the 'measured' effect was related to a change in reporting behaviour due to a reduction in depressive/anxiety symptoms, rather than a reduction in CFS symptoms...

"A slow PACE". That's catchy...

It's all done? Great work people. Are we going to get a PR article on it?

PS: I just opened up weird options on the forum after accidentally pressing ctrl+something. *gulp*.

Yes, hopefully that will be up later today...soonish, anyway. Didn't quite manage to get it all done in time for the target of a May 12 launch for both the new forums and the PACE report, but we were pretty close...

Seems like you've all put in heroic efforts Mark. I need to be better at getting things done... you're all an inspiration.

I had assumed that they were given them to be filled in rather than being led through them... but that was just dangerous good faith on my part. I don't think that they said one way or the other. I can't see any legitimate reason for doing it that way though, and as you say, it just greatly increases the potential for bias.

I did read some things about the impact of different ways of taking tests affecting the scores... I think that some of it was in the Bowling paper that they cited for their SF36 PF norms. That paper also mentioned that people with chronic health problems tended to get higher SF36 scores if they had already filled out a questionnaire specifically about their health condition first, possibly making the order of when patients filled out CFQs and SF36 PF questionnaires important.

I could probably dig out a quote if you wanted... I've forgotten so much of this stuff already though!

PS: I just dug out the paper... and there was nothing really conclusive. It was more about reporting different concerns and possible recommendations. As this paper's now quite old, it could well be that more recent work supersedes it. This was all for population based stuff, and nothing about trials where researchers want to show the efficacy of particular treatments.