An open letter to Psychological Medicine, again!

Last week, Virology Blog posted an open letter to the editors of Psychological Medicine. The letter called on them to retract the misleading findings that participants in the PACE trial for ME/CFS had recovered from cognitive behavior therapy and graded exercise therapy. More than 100 scientists, clinicians, other experts and patient organizations signed the letter.

Three days later, I received a response from Sir Robin Murray, the UK editor of Psychological Medicine. Here’s what he wrote:

 Thank you for your letter and your continuing interest in the paper on the PACE Trial which Psychological Medicine published. I was interested to learn that Wilshire and colleagues have now published a reanalysis of the original data from the PACE Trial in the journal Fatigue: Biomedicine, Health & Behavior, a publication that I was not previously aware of. Presumably, interested parties will now be able to read this reanalysis and compare the scientific qualiity of the re-analysis with that of the original. My understanding is that this is the way that science advances.

This is an unacceptable response.  Sir Robin Murray is misguided if he believes that science advances by allowing misleading claims based on manipulated data to stand in the literature. When researchers include participants who were already recovered on key indicators at baseline, the findings are by definition so flawed and nonsensical they must be retracted.

That the editors of Psychological Medicine do not grasp that it is impossible to be disabled and recovered simultaneously on an outcome measure is astonishing and deeply troubling. It is equally astonishing that the PACE authors now defend themselves, as noted in a New York Times opinion piece on Sunday, by arguing that this overlap doesn’t matter because there were also other recovery criteria.

In response to the comments from Psychological Medicine, we are reposting the open letter with 17 added individuals and 24 more organizations, for a total of 142 signatories altogether. These include two lawyers from Queen Mary University of London, the academic home of lead PACE investigator Peter White, along with other experts and ME/CFS patient groups from around the world.

 

Sir Robin Murray and Dr. Kenneth Kendler
Psychological Medicine
Cambridge University Press
University Printing House
Shaftesbury Road
Cambridge CB2 8BS
UK

Dear Sir Robin Murray and Dr. Kendler:

In 2013, Psychological Medicine published an article called Recovery from chronic fatigue syndrome after treatments given in the PACE trial.[1] In the paper, White et al. reported that graded exercise therapy (GET) and cognitive behavioural therapy (CBT) each led to recovery in 22% of patients, compared with only 7% in a comparison group. The two treatments, they concluded, offered patients the best chance of recovery.

PACE was the largest clinical trial ever conducted for chronic fatigue syndrome (also known as myalgic encephalomyelitis, or ME/CFS), with the first results published in The Lancet in 2011.[2] It was an open-label study with subjective primary outcomes, a design that requires strict vigilance to prevent the possibility of bias. Yet PACE suffered from major flaws that have raised serious concerns about the validity, reliability and integrity of the findings.[3] Despite these flaws, White et al.’s claims of recovery in Psychological Medicine have greatly impacted treatment, research, and public attitudes towards ME/CFS.

According to the protocol for the PACE trial, participants needed to meet specific benchmarks on four different measures in order to be defined as having achieved recovery.[4] But in Psychological Medicine, White et al. significantly relaxed each of the four required outcomes, making recovery far easier to achieve. No PACE oversight committees appear to have approved the redefinition of recovery; at least, no such approvals were mentioned. White et al. did not publish the results they would have gotten using the original protocol approach, nor did they include sensitivity analyses, the standard statistical method for assessing the impact of such changes.

Patients, advocates and some scientists quickly pointed out these and other problems. In October of 2015, Virology Blog published an investigation of PACE, by David Tuller of the University of California, Berkeley, that confirmed the trial’s methodological lapses.[5] Since then, more than 12,000 patients and supporters have signed a petition calling for Psychological Medicine to retract the questionable recovery claims. Yet the journal has taken no steps to address the issues.

Last summer, Queen Mary University of London released anonymized PACE trial data under a tribunal order arising from a patient’s freedom-of-information request. In December, an independent research group used that newly released data to calculate the recovery results per the original methodology outlined in the protocol.[6] This reanalysis documented what was already clear: that the claims of recovery could not be taken at face value.

In the reanalysis, which appeared in the journal Fatigue: Biomedicine, Health & Behavior, Wilshire et al. reported that the PACE protocol’s definition of recovery yielded recovery rates of 7 % or less for all arms of the trial. Moreover, in contrast to the findings reported in Psychological Medicine, the PACE interventions offered no statistically significant benefits. In conclusion, noted Wilshire et al., the claim that patients can recover as a result of CBT and GET is not justified by the data, and is highly misleading to clinicians and patients considering these treatments.

In short, the PACE trial had null results for recovery, according to the protocol definition selected by the authors themselves. Besides the inflated recovery results reported in Psychological Medicine, the study suffered from a host of other problems, including the following:

*In a paradox, the revised recovery thresholds for physical function and fatigue–two of the four recovery measures–were so lax that patients could deteriorate during the trial and yet be counted as recovered on these outcomes. In fact, 13 % of participants met one or both of these recovery thresholds at baseline. White et al. did not disclose these salient facts in Psychological Medicine. We know of no other studies in the clinical trial literature in which recovery thresholds for an indicator actually represented worse health status than the entry thresholds for serious disability on the same indicator.

*During the trial, the authors published a newsletter for participants that included glowing testimonials from earlier participants about their positive outcomes in the trial.[7] An article in the same newsletter reported that a national clinical guidelines committee had already recommended CBT and GET as effective; the newsletter article did not mention adaptive pacing therapy, an intervention developed specifically for the PACE trial. The participant testimonials and the newsletter article could have biased the responses of an unknown number of the two hundred or more people still undergoing assessments, about a third of the total sample.

*The PACE protocol included a promise that the investigators would inform prospective participants of any possible conflicts of interest. Key PACE investigators have had longstanding relationships with major insurance companies, advising them on how to handle disability claims related to ME/CFS. However, the trial’s consent forms did not mention these self-evident conflicts of interest. It is irrelevant that insurance companies were not directly involved in the trial and insufficient that the investigators disclosed these links in their published research. Given this serious omission, the consent obtained from the 641 trial participants is of questionable legitimacy.

Such flaws are unacceptable in published research; they cannot be defended or explained away. The PACE investigators have repeatedly tried to address these concerns. Yet their efforts to date, in journal correspondence, news articles, blog posts, and most recently in their response to Wilshire et al. in Fatigue[8], have been incomplete and unconvincing.

The PACE trial compounded these errors by using a case definition for the illness that required only one symptom–six months of disabling, unexplained fatigue. A 2015 report from the U.S. National Institutes of Health recommended abandoning this single-symptom approach for identifying patients.[9] The NIH report concluded that this broad case definition generated heterogeneous samples of people with a variety of fatiguing illnesses, and that using it to study ME/CFS could impair progress and cause harm.

PACE included sub-group analyses of two alternate and more specific case definitions, but these case definitions were modified in ways that could have impacted the results. Moreover, an unknown number of prospective participants might have met these alternate criteria but been excluded from the study by the initial screening.

To protect patients from ineffective and possibly harmful treatments, White et al.’s recovery claims cannot stand in the literature. Therefore, we are asking Psychological Medicine to retract the paper immediately. Patients and clinicians deserve and expect accurate and unbiased information on which to base their treatment decisions. We urge you to take action without further delay.

Sincerely,

Dharam V. Ablashi, DVM, MS, Dip Bact
Scientific Director
HHV-6 Foundation
Former Senior Investigator
National Cancer Institute
National Institutes of Health
Bethesda, Maryland, USA

James N. Baraniuk, MD
Professor, Department of Medicine
Georgetown University
Washington, D.C., USA

Lisa F. Barcellos, MPH, PhD
Professor of Epidemiology
School of Public Health
California Institute for Quantitative Biosciences
University of California, Berkeley
Berkeley, California, USA

Lucinda Bateman, MD
Medical Director
Bateman Horne Center
Salt Lake City, Utah, USA

Alison C. Bested, MD, FRCPC
Clinical Associate Professor
Faculty of Medicine
University of British Columbia
Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada

Molly Brown, PhD
Assistant Professor
Department of Psychology
DePaul University
Chicago, Illinois, USA

John Chia, MD
Clinician and Researcher
EVMED Research
Lomita, California, USA

Todd E. Davenport, PT, DPT, MPH, OCS
Associate Professor
Department of Physical Therapy
University of the Pacific
Stockton, California, USA

Ronald W. Davis, PhD
Professor of Biochemistry and Genetics
Stanford University
Stanford, California, USA

Simon Duffy, PhD, FRSA
Director
Centre for Welfare Reform
Sheffield, UK

Jonathan C.W. Edwards, MD
Emeritus Professor of Medicine
University College London
London, UK

Derek Enlander, MD
New York, New York, USA

Meredyth Evans, PhD
Clinical Psychologist and Researcher
Chicago, Illinois, USA

Kenneth J. Friedman, PhD
Associate Professor of Physiology and Pharmacology (retired)
New Jersey Medical School
University of Medicine and Dentistry of New Jersey
Newark, New Jersey, USA

Robert F. Garry, PhD
Professor of Microbiology and Immunology
Tulane University School of Medicine
New Orleans, Louisiana, USA

Keith Geraghty, PhD
Honorary Research Fellow
Division of Population Health, Health Services Research & Primary Care
School of Health Sciences
University of Manchester
Manchester, UK

Ian Gibson, PhD
Former Member of Parliament for Norwich North
Former Dean, School of Biological Sciences
University of East Anglia
Honorary Senior Lecturer and Associate Tutor
Norwich Medical School
University of East Anglia
Norwich, UK

Rebecca Goldin, PhD
Professor of Mathematics
George Mason University
Fairfax, Virginia, USA

Ellen Goudsmit, PhD, FBPsS
Health Psychologist (retired)
Former Visiting Research Fellow
University of East London
London, UK

Maureen Hanson, PhD
Liberty Hyde Bailey Professor
Department of Molecular Biology and Genetics
Cornell University
Ithaca, New York, USA

Malcolm Hooper, PhD
Emeritus Professor of Medicinal Chemistry
University of Sunderland
Sunderland, UK

Leonard A. Jason, PhD
Professor of Psychology
DePaul University
Chicago, Illinois, USA

Michael W. Kahn, MD
Assistant Professor of Psychiatry
Harvard Medical School
Boston, Massachusetts, USA

Jon D. Kaiser, MD
Clinical Faculty
Department of Medicine
University of California, San Francisco
San Francisco, California, USA

David L. Kaufman, MD
Medical Director
Open Medicine Institute
Mountain View, California, USA

Betsy Keller, PhD
Department of Exercise and Sports Sciences
Ithaca College
Ithaca, New York, USA

Nancy Klimas, MD
Director, Institute for Neuro-Immune Medicine
Nova Southeastern University
Director, Miami VA Medical Center GWI and CFS/ME Program
Miami, Florida, USA

Andreas M. Kogelnik, MD, PhD
Director and Chief Executive Officer
Open Medicine Institute
Mountain View, California, USA

Eliana M. Lacerda, MD, MSc, PhD
Clinical Assistant Professor
Disability & Eye Health Group/Clinical Research Department
Faculty of Infectious and Tropical Diseases
London School of Hygiene & Tropical Medicine
London, UK

Charles W. Lapp, MD
Medical Director
Hunter-Hopkins Center
Charlotte, North Carolina, USA
Assistant Consulting Professor
Department of Community and Family Medicine
Duke University School of Medicine
Durham, North Carolina, USA

Bruce Levin, PhD
Professor of Biostatistics
Columbia University
New York, New York, USA

Alan R. Light, PhD
Professor of Anesthesiology
Professor of Neurobiology and Anatomy
University of Utah
Salt Lake City, Utah, USA

Vincent C. Lombardi, PhD
Director of Research
Nevada Center for Biomedical Research
Reno, Nevada, USA

Alex Lubet, PhD
Professor of Music
Head, Interdisciplinary Graduate Group in Disability Studies
Affiliate Faculty, Center for Bioethics
Affiliate Faculty, Center for Cognitive Sciences
University of Minnesota
Minneapolis, Minnesota, USA

Steven Lubet
Williams Memorial Professor of Law
Northwestern University Pritzker School of Law
Chicago, Illinois, USA

Sonya Marshall-Gradisnik, PhD
Professor of Immunology
Co-Director, National Centre for Neuroimmunology and Emerging Diseases
Griffith University
Queensland, Australia

Patrick E. McKnight, PhD
Professor of Psychology
George Mason University
Fairfax, Virginia, USA

Jose G. Montoya, MD, FACP, FIDSA
Professor of Medicine
Division of Infectious Diseases and Geographic Medicine
Stanford University School of Medicine
Stanford, California, USA

Zaher Nahle, PhD, MPA
Vice President for Research and Scientific Programs
Solve ME/CFS Initiative
Los Angeles, California, USA

Henrik Nielsen, MD
Specialist in Internal Medicine and Rheumatology
Copenhagen, Denmark

James M. Oleske, MD, MPH
François-Xavier Bagnoud Professor of Pediatrics
Senator of RBHS Research Centers, Bureaus, and Institutes
Director, Division of Pediatrics Allergy, Immunology & Infectious Diseases
Department of Pediatrics
Rutgers New Jersey Medical School
Newark, New Jersey, USA

Elisa Oltra, PhD
Professor of Molecular and Cellular Biology
Catholic University of Valencia School of Medicine
Valencia, Spain

Richard Podell, MD, MPH
Clinical Professor
Department of Family Medicine
Rutgers Robert Wood Johnson Medical School
New Brunswick, New Jersey, USA

Nicole Porter, PhD
Psychologist in Private Practice
Rolling Ground, Wisconsin, USA

Vincent R. Racaniello, PhD
Professor of Microbiology and Immunology
Columbia University
New York, New York, USA

Arthur L. Reingold, MD
Professor of Epidemiology
University of California, Berkeley
Berkeley, California, USA

Anders Rosén, MD
Professor of Inflammation and Tumor Biology
Department of Clinical and Experimental Medicine
Division of Cell Biology
Linköping University
Linköping, Sweden

Peter C. Rowe, MD
Professor of Pediatrics
Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine
Baltimore, Maryland, USA

William Satariano, PhD
Professor of Epidemiology and Community Health
University of California, Berkeley
Berkeley, California, USA

Ola Didrik Saugstad, MD, PhD, FRCPE
Professor of Pediatrics
University of Oslo
Director and Department Head
Department of Pediatric Research
University of Oslo and Oslo University Hospital
Oslo, Norway

Charles Shepherd, MB, BS
Honorary Medical Adviser to the ME Association
Buckingham, UK

Christopher R. Snell, PhD
Scientific Director
WorkWell Foundation
Ripon, California, USA

Donald R. Staines, MBBS, MPH, FAFPHM, FAFOEM
Clinical Professor
Menzies Health Institute Queensland
Co-Director, National Centre for Neuroimmunology and Emerging Diseases
Griffith University
Queensland, Australia

Philip B. Stark, PhD
Professor of Statistics
University of California, Berkeley
Berkeley, California, USA

Eleanor Stein, MD, FRCP(C)
Psychiatrist in Private Practice
Assistant Clinical Professor
University of Calgary
Calgary, Alberta, Canada

Staci Stevens, MA
Founder, Exercise Physiologist
Workwell Foundation
Ripon, California, USA

Julian Stewart, MD, PhD
Professor of Pediatrics, Physiology and Medicine
Associate Chairman for Patient Oriented Research
Director, Center for Hypotension
New York Medical College
Hawthorne, NY, USA

Leonie Sugarman, PhD
Emeritus Associate Professor of Applied Psychology
University of Cumbria
Carlisle, UK

John Swartzberg, MD
Clinical Professor Emeritus
School of Public Health
University of California, Berkeley
Berkeley, California, USA

Ronald G. Tompkins, MD, ScD
Summer M Redstone Professor of Surgery
Harvard Medical School
Boston, Massachusetts, USA

David Tuller, DrPH
Lecturer in Public Health and Journalism
University of California, Berkeley
Berkeley, California, USA

Rosemary A. Underhill, MB, BS, MRCOG, FRCSE
Physician and Independent Researcher
Palm Coast, Florida, USA

Rosamund Vallings, MNZM, MB, BS
General Practitioner
Auckland, New Zealand

Michael VanElzakker, PhD
Research Fellow, Psychiatric Neuroscience Division
Harvard Medical School & Massachusetts General Hospital
Instructor, Tufts University Psychology
Boston, Massachusetts, USA

Mark VanNess, PhD
Professor of Health, Exercise & Sports Sciences
University of the Pacific
Stockton, California, USA
Workwell Foundation
Ripon, California, USA

Mark Vink, MD
Family Physician
Soerabaja Research Center
Amsterdam, Netherlands

Frans Visser, MD
Cardiologist
Stichting Cardiozorg
Hoofddorp, Netherlands

Tony Ward, MA (Hons), PhD, DipClinPsyc
Registered Clinical Psychologist
Professor of Clinical Psychology
School of Psychology
Victoria University of Wellington
Wellington, New Zealand
Adjunct Professor, School of Psychology
University of Birmingham
Birmingham, UK
Adjunct Professor, School of Psychology
University of Kent
Canterbury, UK

William Weir, FRCP
Infectious Disease Consultant
London, UK

John Whiting, MD
Specialist Physician
Private Practice
Brisbane, Australia

Carolyn Wilshire, PhD
Senior Lecturer
School of Psychology
Victoria University of Wellington
Wellington, New Zealand

Michael Zeineh, MD, PhD
Assistant Professor
Department of Radiology
Stanford University
Stanford, California, USA

Marcie Zinn, PhD
Research Consultant in Experimental Electrical Neuroimaging and Statistics
Center for Community Research
DePaul University
Chicago, Illinois, USA
Executive Director
Society for Neuroscience and Psychology in the Performing Arts
Dublin, California, USA

Mark Zinn, MM
Research Consultant in Experimental Electrophysiology
Center for Community Research
DePaul University
Chicago, Illinois, USA

New individuals added 23 March 2017

Norman E. Booth, PhD, FInstP
Emeritus Fellow in Physics
Mansfield College
University of Oxford
Oxford, UK

Joan Crawford, CPsychol, CEng, CSci, MA, MSc
Chartered Counselling Psychologist
Chronic Pain Management Service
St Helens Hospital
St Helens, UK

Lucy Dechene, PhD
Professor of Mathematics (retired)
Fitchburg State University
Fitchburg, Massachusetts, USA

Valerie Eliot Smith
Barrister and Visiting Scholar
Centre for Commercial Law Studies
Queen Mary University of London
London, UK

Margaret C. Fernald, PhD
Clinical and Research Psychologist
University of Maine
Orono, Maine, USA

Simin Ghatineh, MSc, PhD
Biochemist
London, UK

Alan Gurwitt, M.D.
Former Clinical Child Psychiatry Faculty Member
Yale Child Study Center, New Haven, Connecticut
University of Connecticut School of Medicine, Farmington, Connecticut
Harvard Medical School, Boston, Massachusetts
Co-author of primers on Adult and Pediatric ME/CFS
Clinician in Private Practice (retired)
Boston, Massachusetts, USA

Geoffrey Hallmann, LLB, DipLegPrac
Former Laywer, (Disability And Compensation)
Lismore, Australia

Susan Levine, MD
Clinician in Private Practice
New York, New York, USA
Visiting Fellow
Cornell University
Ithaca, New York, USA

Marvin S. Medow, Ph.D.
Professor of Pediatrics and Physiology
Chairman, New York Medical College IRB
Associate Director of The Center for Hypotension
New York Medical College
Hawthorne, New York, USA

Sarah Myhill MB BS
Clinician in Private Practice
Knighton, UK

Pamela Phillips, Dip, Dip. MSc MBACP (registered)
Counsellor in Private Practice
London, UK

Gwenda L Schmidt-Snoek, PhD
Researcher
Former Assistant Professor of Psychology
Hope College
Holland, Michigan, USA

Robin Callender Smith, PhD
Professor of Media Law
Centre for Commercial Law Studies
Queen Mary University of London.
Barrister and Information Rights Judge
London, UK

Samuel Tucker, MD
Former Assistant Clinical Professor of Psychiatry
University of California, San Francisco
San Francisco, California, USA

AM Uyttersprot, MD
Neuropsychiatrist
AZ Jan Portaels
Vilvoorde, Belgium

Paul Wadeson, Bsc, MBChB, MRCGP
GP Principal
Ash Trees Surgery
Carnforth, UK

 

ME/CFS Patient Organizations

25% ME Group
UK

Emerge Australia
Australia

European ME Alliance:

Belgium ME/CFS Association
Belgium

ME Foreningen
Denmark

Suomen CFS-Yhdistys
Finland

Fatigatio e.V.
Germany

Het Alternatief
Netherlands

Icelandic ME Association
Iceland

Irish ME Trust
Ireland

Associazione Malati di CFS
Italy

Norges ME-forening
Norway

Liga SFC
Spain

Riksföreningen för ME-patienter
Sweden

Verein ME/CFS Schweiz
Switzerland

Invest in ME Research
UK

Hope 4 ME & Fibro Northern Ireland
UK

Irish ME/CFS Association
Ireland

Massachusetts CFIDS/ME & FM Association
USA

ME Association
UK

ME/cvs Vereniging
Netherlands

National ME/FM Action Network
Canada

New Jersey ME/CFS Association
USA

Pandora Org
USA

Phoenix Rising
International membership representing many countries

Solve ME/CFS Initiative
USA

Tymes Trust (The Young ME Sufferers Trust)
UK

Wisconsin ME and CFS Association
USA

New Organizations added 23 March 2017

Action CND
Canada

Associated New Zealand ME Society
New Zealand

Chester MESH (ME self-help) group
Chester, UK

German Society for ME/CFS (Deutsche Gesellschaft für ME/CFS)
Germany

Lost Voices Stiftung
Germany

M.E. Victoria Association
Canada

ME North East
UK

ME Research UK
UK

ME Self Help Group Nottingham
UK

ME/CFS and Lyme Association of WA, Inc.
Australia

ME/CFS (Australia) Ltd
Australia

ME/CFS Australia (SA), Inc.
Australia

ME/CVS Stichting Nederland
Netherlands

ME/FM Myalgic Encephalomyelitis and Fibromyalgia Society of British Columbia
Canada

[1] White PD, Goldsmith K, Johnson AL, et al. 2013. Recovery from chronic fatigue syndrome after treatments given in the PACE trial. Psychological Medicine 43(10): 2227-2235.

[2] White PD, Goldsmith KA, Johnson AL, et al. 2011. Comparison of adaptive pacing therapy, cognitive behaviour therapy, graded exercise therapy, and specialist medical care for chronic fatigue syndrome (PACE): a randomised trial. The Lancet 377: 823–836

[3] Racaniello V. 2016. An open letter to The Lancet, again. Virology Blog, 10 Feb. Available at: https://www.virology.ws/2016/02/10/open-letter-lancet-again/ (accessed on 2/24/17).

[4] White PD, Sharpe MC, Chalder T, et al. 2007. Protocol for the PACE trial: a randomised controlled trial of adaptive pacing, cognitive behaviour therapy, and graded exercise, as supplements to standardised specialist medical care versus standardised specialist medical care alone for patients with the chronic fatigue syndrome/myalgic encephalomyelitis or encephalopathy. BMC Neurology 7: 6.

[5] Tuller D. 2015. Trial by error: the troubling case of the PACE chronic fatigue syndrome trial. Virology Blog, 21-23 Oct. Available at: https://www.virology.ws/2015/10/21/trial-by-error-i/ (accessed on 2/24/17)

[6] Wilshire C, Kindlon T, Matthees A, McGrath S. 2016. Can patients with chronic fatigue syndrome really recover after graded exercise or cognitive behavioural therapy? A critical commentary and preliminary re-analysis of the PACE trial. Fatigue: Biomedicine, Health & Behavior; published online 14 Dec. Available at: http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/21641846.2017.1259724 (accessed on 2/24/17)

[7] PACE Participants Newsletter. December 2008. Issue 3. Available at: http://www.wolfson.qmul.ac.uk/images/pdfs/participantsnewsletter3.pdf (accessed on 2/24/17).

[8] Sharpe M, Chalder T, Johnson AL, et al. 2017. Do more people recover from chronic fatigue syndrome with cognitive behaviour therapy or graded exercise therapy than with other treatments? Fatigue: Biomedicine, Health & Behavior; published online 15 Feb. Available at: http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/21641846.2017.1288629 (accessed on 2/24/17).

[9] Green CR, Cowan P, Elk R. 2015. National Institutes of Health Pathways to Prevention Workshop: Advancing the research on myalgic encephalomyelitis/chronic fatigue syndrome. Annals of Internal Medicine 162: 860-865.