On 2013 Oct 29, Tom Kindlon commented:

Was this study sufficiently powered to find oxidative phosphorylation?

It is not desirable if a promising line of enquiry is prematurely ended by an underpowered study. Looking at Table 4 and in particular, rows 1, 2 and 4 where the figures go up for the controls from test 1 to test 2 and go down for the CFS/ME patients, I am left wondering whether a bigger study would have found a statistically significant difference. This is not a criticism of the researchers as, like all teams, I'm sure they would have preferred bigger samples but funding and other issues restrict what is possible for any one study. Also, the team in this case probably did not have advance data to do power calculations. It will be interesting to see if similar changes are evident in future studies* and whether pooled data would show differences even if individual studies don't reach the magical "statistical significance".

*if any researchers investigate this again - the volume of study in CFS is low and there is a range of issues to look at

On 2013 Oct 29, Tom Kindlon commented:

Was this study sufficiently powered to find oxidative phosphorylation?

It is not desirable if a promising line of enquiry is prematurely ended by an underpowered study. Looking at Table 4 and in particular, rows 1, 2 and 4 where the figures go up for the controls from test 1 to test 2 and go down for the CFS/ME patients, I am left wondering whether a bigger study would have found a statistically significant difference. This is not a criticism of the researchers as, like all teams, I'm sure they would have preferred bigger samples but funding and other issues restrict what is possible for any one study. Also, the team in this case probably did not have advance data to do power calculations. It will be interesting to see if similar changes are evident in future studies* and whether pooled data would show differences even if individual studies don't reach the magical "statistical significance".

*if any researchers investigate this again - the volume of study in CFS is low and there is a range of issues to look at