Hall, Daniel L, Lattie, Emily G, Milrad, Sara F et al. · Journal of psychosomatic research · 2017 · DOI
This study tested whether teaching stress management skills over the telephone worked as well as learning them in a live group setting for people with ME/CFS. Both formats helped reduce stress, but only the in-person group also improved physical symptoms like post-exertional malaise, chills, fever, and sleep quality. This suggests that meeting face-to-face may have extra benefits beyond just learning the techniques themselves.
Many ME/CFS patients struggle to attend in-person appointments due to illness severity, making telehealth delivery attractive. However, this study suggests that live group interactions may provide therapeutic benefits beyond stress reduction alone—including direct improvements in core CFS symptoms—which could inform treatment accessibility and delivery decisions for this population.
This study does not establish that the differences between live and telephone formats are solely due to in-person contact; unmeasured factors (group cohesion dynamics, social support activation, non-verbal communication) may explain the divergent outcomes. The study also cannot prove that symptom improvements are causally driven by stress reduction rather than other mechanisms, and generalizability may be limited by the predominantly female sample (90%) and participants willing to engage in group intervention.
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
Hall, Daniel L, Lattie, Emily G, Milrad, Sara F, Czaja, Sara, Fletcher, Mary Ann, Klimas, Nancy, et al. (2017). Telephone-administered versus live group cognitive behavioral stress management for adults with CFS.. Journal of psychosomatic research. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jpsychores.2016.12.004
BibTeX
@article{mecfsatlas-hall-2017-telephone-administered,
author = {Hall, Daniel L and Lattie, Emily G and Milrad, Sara F and Czaja, Sara and Fletcher, Mary Ann and Klimas, Nancy and Perdomo, Dolores and Antoni, Michael H},
title = {Telephone-administered versus live group cognitive behavioral stress management for adults with CFS.},
journal = {Journal of psychosomatic research},
year = {2017},
doi = {10.1016/j.jpsychores.2016.12.004},
note = {PubMed: 28107891},
url = {https://www.mecfsatlas.com/evidence/hall-2017-telephone-administered},
}Atlas snapshot reference
ME/CFS Atlas. Generator v1 / Scanner v1.4 / policy v0.1. Accessed 2026-05-28. https://www.mecfsatlas.com/evidence/hall-2017-telephone-administered
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