First of all, why am I interested in this? Well, I have friends who are affected by this horrid condition (ME – myalgic encephalomyelitis), so this trial has a bearing on how they might be treated (or not), and I used to work as an editor at The Lancet, the journal that published the trial. I then trained as a medical statistician, and worked in research for a couple of years.

I know I’m a little late to this party, but I did read the paper when it was first published in 2011, and made some notes about it at the time. So I’ve updated them here.

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The PACE trial was a hugely ambitious and complicated study of several interventions in patients with chronic fatigue syndrome (CFS). The interventions – graded exercise therapy (GET), cognitive behavioural therapy (CBT), and adaptive pacing therapy (APT) – involved a large number…