Tag: OMEGA

Eleven Days of Christmas

Well, in my previous post (a few hours ago), I did say to take a closer look at the MEGA site in case there was something I’d missed – and too right I was. I had failed to read the new MEGA blog post, thinking that it was just about the change of deadline for applications to join the patient advisory group. I hadn’t realised that it also provides a schedule for subsequent weeks. Here it is:

  • 9am 13 December 2016 – Deadline for applications to join the MEGA Patient Advisory Group
  • 13-14 December – Applicants contacted and group members confirmed
  • w/c 19 December – Papers and key information sent out to Patient Advisory Group members
  • 29 or 30 December – Patient Advisory Group teleconference and/or e-group meeting held
  • 4 January 2017 – Back-up call for Patient Advisory Group if needed, to address outstanding issues from December meeting.

So patients are to be given a maximum of eleven days to read the ‘papers and key information’ before discussing it and -presumably – suggesting possible alterations in a teleconference or e-group meeting over the Christmas period! So not only are they expected to do this over Christmas, but the twelve days of Christmas has been shortened to a maximum of eleven. Notice the w/c in there – not meaning ‘toilet’ in this instance (although some might think this an appropriate place to sling the schedule) but ‘week-commencing’, so the papers could theoretically arrive any time that week, which might be as little as six days before the conference.

At least they accept the possible need for a backup call ‘to address outstanding issues’ and also feel that some explanation is due. They say:

The reason that the timescale is so short is because the mainstream funder to whom we want to apply for MEGA funding has an application deadline in early January 2017. This deadline was only recently announced and was different to the timings we expected.

and:

If we miss the deadline for this funder, we will not be able to apply again until 2018.

Even so, to use an old joke from Have I Got News For You, the words piss-up and brewery spring to mind. And of course many will say that they’ve carefully planned it like this to deliberately discourage and marginalise patient involvement. I can fully understand that point of view. If MEGA really want to win back the trust of the patient community, they are not going the right way about it.

Does this make an difference to my decision to apply for the patient advisory group? I’m still processing that one. But I’m getting more and more annoyed. Three more words have sprung to mind: ‘taking the’ and ‘piss’. And it’s not us that’s doing it…

(My normal pristine standard of vocabulary will be resumed in the next post.)

See also this OMEGA post which I should have read yesterday, including pertinent comments by Peter T.

The OMEGA Petition – Email to Professor Holgate

This email has been sent to Professor Holgate of MEGA. Many thanks to all those who signed. (Whoops! missed a few… Total signatures now updated to 221)

((Please note that we are not the organisers of the OMEGA petition.))

Dear Professor Holgate – We comprise a number of M.E. patients and carers, 218 in all. Please see our signatures at the end of this email..

We are writing because we notice your suggestion in your letter to Professor Jonathan Edwards that OMEGA (the petition opposing the MEGA study) has attracted so many signatures due to the support of Invest In ME. We are writing to assure you that we patients and carers are able to look at the evidence and make up our own minds on such issues.

Here are some of the grave concerns that we have about the MEGA study as it has been proposed. It seems likely that you have heard many of them before but in view of your professed perplexity about the OMEGA petition, we want to make sure you are aware of the issues. For the same reason, we are copying this to the other members of the MEGA team and to those you copied in to your letter to Professor Edwards. We are also sending a copy to Professor Edwards himself, and the email will be posted online at the Spoonseeker blog.

Our concerns about MEGA include the following:

Patients from the NHS CFS/ME clinics (apparently the intended source for MEGA) will not yield a representative sample of people with M.E. The reasons for this include:

  • Most severely affected patients cannot access the clinics and so will not be included in the study.
  • There will be an inevitable selection bias towards the mildly affected because
    • the clinics will tend to select such patients as those most likely to respond to the behavioural therapies on offer, and
    • the more severely affected patients will be more likely to reject such therapies – and hence the clinics – as inappropriate.
  • Other more severely affected patients will no longer be on the clinic’s system
    • either because they have not responded well to the therapies, dropped out, and not been followed up (as feedback suggests is often the case) or
    • they are among the long term sick who are no longer on the system because treatment is time-restricted

There has been a suggestion, following representations from patients, Continue reading “The OMEGA Petition – Email to Professor Holgate”

Big Data Danger

This post comes mainly courtesy (again) of the astute Steve Hawkins, who responded to my concerns in the Getting Airborne post about the possible dangers of a MEGA Biobank. Over to Steve:

On the ‘big data’ front, I think that all genuine physical measurements will be useful if used in the right way. The danger comes from any extraction/filtering that uses diagnosis as the reference field. If they do that – and I’m sure Crawley and Co would, because they think they can diagnose without biomarkers – the results would be garbage, as there would be many conditions given the wrong name but appearing together.

On the other hand, filtering on key concrete signs like PEM, POTS, bedbound, etc. would pull up useful groupings whatever the ostensible diagnosis.

In the wider scheme of things, there are now a number of entrepreneuring projects aiming to collect ALL big medical data, and link all medical databases together. I read a good piece on this recently by one bioinformatician who is setting up a giant server, but I don’t seem to have bookmarked it. Here is a conference on getting all genomic information into ‘the cloud’ for free searching and filtering: And one from The Lancet, on the astronomical amount of data that is about to flow from mobile phones whose apps have turned into our version of Star Trek’s ‘tricorder’. All this info will go into ‘the cloud’:

So we’re getting to the stage where all data is useful: so long as it is faithfully produced. Sadly, we know from PACE that data will have to be graded by association with researcher, and those who cannot be trusted will have their data discarded. There is nothing they can do about this: if their name is on their shoddy work, it will go nowhere, and all the data they collected will be wasted.

There lies the danger of MEGA: not that it will pollute the big data, but that any good data it contains will be at risk of being discarded by everyone but Crawley and her associates. That is why patients should NOT let their data be associated with MEGA while Crawley is involved.

I think Steve has nailed it there, and as it seems unlikely that Prof Crawley will be willing to part company with MEGA, I still believe that we should sign the OMEGA (Opposing MEGA) petition to demonstrate our strength of feeling against the proposal as it stands. The original pro-MEGA petition has now been closed – perhaps because they realised that more people were taking their signatures off than were putting them on – but the OMEGA team are still promoting their counter petition. Here is their latest blog. Scroll to the end for the link to their petition or just click here.