Covelli, Vito, Passeri, Maria Elena, Leogrande, Domenica et al. · Current medicinal chemistry · 2005 · DOI
This review examines how stress affects both the nervous and immune systems, and explores potential drug treatments for stress-related disorders. The authors discuss how the body's stress response systems can trigger or worsen conditions like chronic fatigue syndrome (CFS), and suggest that medicines targeting immune cell activity and inflammatory chemicals may help. They found that CFS patients have different immune patterns compared to depressed patients, which could guide future treatment approaches.
This review is relevant to ME/CFS because it proposes that abnormal immune and nervous system interactions contribute to CFS pathophysiology, and identifies potential drug targets for treatment. Understanding these neuroimmune mechanisms may help explain why CFS patients experience fatigue, post-exertional malaise, and other symptoms, and could inform development of targeted therapies.
This review does not definitively establish cause-and-effect relationships between immune abnormalities and CFS symptoms, nor does it prove that any specific drug is effective for CFS patients. The evidence cited is observational and from varied study designs; the authors acknowledge that no specific CFS biomarkers have been consistently identified. The review also does not establish whether immune changes are primary drivers of CFS or secondary consequences of the disease.
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
Covelli, Vito, Passeri, Maria Elena, Leogrande, Domenica, Jirillo, Emilio, & Amati, Luigi (2005). Drug targets in stress-related disorders.. Current medicinal chemistry. https://doi.org/10.2174/0929867054367202
BibTeX
@article{mecfsatlas-covelli-2005-drug-targets,
author = {Covelli, Vito and Passeri, Maria Elena and Leogrande, Domenica and Jirillo, Emilio and Amati, Luigi},
title = {Drug targets in stress-related disorders.},
journal = {Current medicinal chemistry},
year = {2005},
doi = {10.2174/0929867054367202},
note = {PubMed: 16029148},
url = {https://www.mecfsatlas.com/evidence/covelli-2005-drug-targets},
}Atlas snapshot reference
ME/CFS Atlas. Generator v1 / Scanner v1.4 / policy v0.1. Accessed 2026-05-30. https://www.mecfsatlas.com/evidence/covelli-2005-drug-targets
Contribute
Private, reviewed by a human. Not a public comment thread.