In 2017 I was an inpatient at the NIH for their first on-campus study of myalgic encephalomyelitis/chronic fatigue syndrome in 30 years.
The study is being published next week...7 years later.
The researchers were thorough & dedicated but the study was so ambitious that it was under-resourced. They cast a wide net w/ many tests & technologies to generate hypotheses. I spent 21 nights at the Clinical Center over two visits.
I've read a draft. It reconfirms previous findings, pushes back on pervasive medical misinformation & reports a few things that, to my eye, look new. But I don't think there's anything really earth-shattering in there. The researchers have come up with an overarching hypothesis for the illness, but they're doing so based on 17 patients...so that's a little dicey.
Now NIH has to follow through with clinical trials. The paper has some ideas for drugs to try. They need to do so.
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