When the US National Institutes of Health released its lengthy ME/CFS study last month with much fanfare and publicity, the London-based Science Media Centre asked Professor Chris Ponting, among other experts, to provide comment. The study–“Deep phenotyping of post-infectious myalgic encephalomyelitis/chronic fatigue syndrome”–was published by Nature Communications. It included in-depth findings from 17 ME/CFS patients and 21 healthy controls and caused much anger and distress among members of the patient community, particular over its focus on a bizarre construct called “effort preference” as a core factor.
Professor Ponting, a geneticist at the University of Edinburgh, is leading a genome-wide association study (GWAS), DecodeME, that has gathered thousands of DNA samples from ME/CFS patients in the UK. His comments about the study indicated he wasn’t especially impressed. I spoke with him the other day to see if he had further impressions. Because of Zoom glitches, I’m posting an edited transcript of our conversation.O2h8sfnDZBU
