On 25 November a new paper was published by David Tuller (University of California, Berkeley), Caroline Struthers (Oxford University) and myself (Michiel Tack, a long-time ME/CFS patient). The paper is about exercise therapy for chronic fatigue syndrome and bias due to lack of blinding. This blog post provides a short summary.
The paper was published in the journal Fatigue: Biomedicine, Health & Behavior and is called: “Bias caused by reliance on patient-reported outcome measures in non-blinded randomized trials: an in-depth look at exercise therapy for chronic fatigue syndrome.“
Our main analysis focuses on a discrepancy between several randomized trial that report graded exercise therapy (GET) for chronic fatigue syndrome (CFS) is effective and multiple surveys by patient organizations that indicate just the opposite.
All trials on GET for CFS were not blinded and relied on patient-reported outcome measures. Some (for example Edwards 2017 and Wilshire et al. 2018
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