Bondar, Galyna, Mahapatra, Abhinandan Das, Bao, Tra-Mi et al. · Journal of clinical medicine · 2024 · DOI
This study examined how genes in immune cells respond to exercise in people with heart failure and healthy volunteers. Researchers took blood samples before, during, and after exercise on a stationary bike and looked for changes in gene activity. They found that certain genes responded differently to exercise depending on how fit someone was, suggesting that gene patterns might help doctors understand exercise capacity and predict outcomes.
ME/CFS shares mechanistic parallels with heart failure including chronic inflammation, immune dysfunction, and post-exertional malaise linked to exercise intolerance. Understanding how immune cell gene expression changes during exercise stress could reveal similar underlying pathways in ME/CFS and identify potential biomarkers to assess disease severity and predict individual responses to exertion, informing safer treatment strategies.
This study does not prove that identified genes cause exercise intolerance or poor outcomes—it only shows correlation between gene expression patterns and fitness levels. The very small sample size (particularly 4 healthy controls) limits the ability to generalize findings to other populations. The study does not directly test ME/CFS patients, so applicability to ME/CFS mechanisms remains speculative pending future validation.
About the PEM badge: “PEM required” means post-exertional malaise was an explicit required diagnostic criterion for participant inclusion in this study — not that PEM was studied, observed, or discussed. Studies using criteria that do not require PEM (e.g. Fukuda, Oxford) are tagged “PEM not required”. How the atlas works →
The first block is for the primary paper and is the citation you should use in research work. The atlas-snapshot line only applies if you are specifically referring to this atlas’s reading of the paper on the date shown.
Primary citation
Bondar, Galyna, Mahapatra, Abhinandan Das, Bao, Tra-Mi, Silacheva, Irina, Hairapetian, Adrian, Vu, Thomas, et al. (2024). An Exercise Immune Fitness Test to Unravel Disease Mechanisms-A Proof-of-Concept Heart Failure Study.. Journal of clinical medicine. https://doi.org/10.3390/jcm13113200
BibTeX
@article{mecfsatlas-bondar-2024-exercise-immune,
author = {Bondar, Galyna and Mahapatra, Abhinandan Das and Bao, Tra-Mi and Silacheva, Irina and Hairapetian, Adrian and Vu, Thomas and Su, Stephanie and Katappagari, Ananya and Galan, Liana and Chandran, Joshua and Adamov, Ruben and Mancusi, Lorenzo and Lai, Isabel and Rahman, Anca and Grogan, Tristan and Hsu, Jeffrey J and Cappelletti, Monica and Ping, Peipei and Elashoff, David and Reed, Elaine F and Deng, Mario C},
title = {An Exercise Immune Fitness Test to Unravel Disease Mechanisms-A Proof-of-Concept Heart Failure Study.},
journal = {Journal of clinical medicine},
year = {2024},
doi = {10.3390/jcm13113200},
note = {PubMed: 38892912},
url = {https://www.mecfsatlas.com/evidence/bondar-2024-exercise-immune},
}Atlas snapshot reference
ME/CFS Atlas. Generator v1 / Scanner v1.4 / policy v0.1. Accessed 2026-05-30. https://www.mecfsatlas.com/evidence/bondar-2024-exercise-immune
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