Eckey, Martha, Li, Peng, Morrison, Braxton et al. · Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2025 · DOI
This study asked nearly 4,000 ME/CFS and long COVID patients about their experiences with over 150 different treatments to see which ones helped them feel better. The researchers found that ME/CFS and long COVID are very similar illnesses with overlapping symptoms and that patients with each condition responded similarly to treatments. The study also discovered that different patient subgroups—like those with heart rate and blood pressure problems, or those with thinking and memory problems—benefited most from specific types of treatments.
With no FDA-approved treatments for ME/CFS or long COVID, this real-world patient data provides crucial evidence for identifying which management strategies may help specific patient subgroups and informs the design of future clinical trials. Understanding that different symptom patterns respond to different treatments could help clinicians provide more personalized care and researchers prioritize which therapies warrant rigorous testing.
This study does not prove that any specific treatment is effective—it only documents what patients perceived as helpful. The findings are based on patient memory and subjective reporting without clinical measurements, placebo controls, or verification of whether treatments truly caused improvements versus coincidental symptom changes. The correlation between ME/CFS and long COVID treatment responses does not establish whether they share identical underlying mechanisms.
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 →
Contribute
Private, reviewed by a human. Not a public comment thread.