PACE trial

The PACE Trial was a large-scale trial to test and compare the effectiveness of four treatments for people suffering from chronic fatigue syndrome (CFS), also known as myalgic encephalomyelitis (ME). These are adaptive pacing therapy (APT), cognitive behaviour therapy (CBT), Graded Exercise Therapy (GET), and standardised Specialist Medical Care (SMC). The main study was published in The Lancet in 2011. . A 2012 PACE paper was published on cost-effectiveness. A PACE Trial "recovery" paper was published in 2013. A long-term follow-up paper was then published in October 2015.

Professor Simon Wessely stated in November 2015 that "there are also more trials in the pipeline".

Controversy
The PACE Trial has been heavily criticised by patient groups and some researchers and science journalists.

Critical Comments
Dr. Ronald Davis, Stanford University: “I’m shocked that the Lancet published it…The PACE study has so many flaws and there are so many questions you’d want to ask about it that I don’t understand how it got through any kind of peer review.”

Dr. Bruce Levin, Columbia University: “To let participants know that interventions have been selected by a government committee ‘based on the best available evidence’ strikes me as the height of clinical trial amateurism.”

Dr. Arthur Reingold, University of California, Berkeley: “Under the circumstances, an independent review of the trial conducted by experts not involved in the design or conduct of the study would seem to be very much in order.”

Dr. Jonathan Edwards, University College London: “It’s a mass of un-interpretability to me…All the issues with the trial are extremely worrying, making interpretation of the clinical significance of the findings more or less impossible.”

Dr. Leonard Jason, DePaul University: “The PACE authors should have reduced the kind of blatant methodological lapses that can impugn the credibility of the research, such as having overlapping recovery and entry/disability criteria.”