The PACE Trial and the Politics of ME/CFS Research
A methodologically compromised clinical trial nonetheless reshaped treatment guidelines for millions of patients. Fifteen years on, it remains unretracted.
Network Contagion Research Institute Health
Patient discourse,
treated as evidence.
Millions of patients living with poorly characterized chronic illness have spent years comparing symptoms, testing treatments, and documenting outcomes in detail medicine has not yet captured. NCRI Health was established to analyze this corpus systematically — and to convert it into evidence that can inform research and clinical practice.
Research Focus All research areas →
Priority Research
Long Covid & ME/CFS
10–30% of SARS-CoV-2 infections result in Long Covid. Five major NIH clinical trials have reported results; none demonstrated efficacy. The central problem is patient heterogeneity — a problem we are positioned to solve.
Read more → MethodsSocial Signal Detection
Patient communities document treatment responses in granular detail, years before clinical trials are designed. Our methods extract structured clinical signal from this corpus at population scale.
Read more → InfrastructureLongitudinal Corpus
NCRI maintains the leading independent archive of Reddit health data — thousands of communities, more than a decade of history, ingested continuously. For chronic illness research, coverage is without parallel.
Read more → Our Approach Full methodology →
Sentiment & Discourse Analysis
Narrative tracking protocols developed for federal and platform-level disinformation work, transposed to patient data.
LLM as Research Instrument
Systematic extraction of symptom timelines, treatment exposures, and outcomes from hundreds of thousands of patient narratives.
Citation & Network Analysis
Graph-analytic methods applied to the scientific literature itself — mapping influence, uncited findings, and conflicts of interest.
Embedded Patient Perspective
Founded by individuals with lived experience in the conditions under study. This informs instrument calibration, not methodology.
Recent Analysis View all →
How Social Media Shapes Medical Consensus
NCRI's influence-operation detection methods applied to contested diagnoses. Network structure proves informative about the locus of narrative control.
Long Covid: What the Data Actually Shows
A review of the strongest available evidence on prevalence and mechanism, with attention to systematic downward revision of official estimates.
NCRI Health is the public health research division of the Network Contagion Research Institute at Rutgers University — a principal authority on the dynamics of information transmission in networked environments.
NCRI scientists pioneered the application of formal epidemiological models to the diffusion of ideas, and built the data infrastructure to observe these processes empirically and at scale. The institute's methods have been adopted by government agencies, technology platforms, and major news organizations.
The same infrastructure, methods, and personnel are now being applied to chronic disease.
Contact & Affiliation
Research inquiries research@ncrihealth.org
Parent institution Network Contagion Research Institute
University affiliation Rutgers University