Hayes, Lawrence D, Sanal-Hayes, Nilihan E M, Mclaughlin, Marie et al. · The American journal of medicine · 2025 · DOI
This study compared balance and physical strength in people with long COVID, people with ME/CFS, and healthy volunteers. Both long COVID and ME/CFS patients showed significantly worse balance during standing and took longer to perform simple physical tasks like standing up from a chair compared to healthy people. Importantly, the balance and strength problems were equally severe in both groups, despite long COVID being a much newer illness.
This finding is crucial because it demonstrates that long COVID and ME/CFS share similar objective physical impairments in balance and capacity despite vastly different disease durations, suggesting common underlying pathophysiology. This evidence strengthens the case for developing shared interventions and recognizing long COVID as potentially following an ME/CFS-like trajectory. It validates the serious physical limitations experienced by ME/CFS patients by showing these deficits are measurable, not subjective, and appear consistent across different patient populations.
This study does not prove that long COVID will inevitably progress to ME/CFS-like chronicity, nor does it establish the mechanisms causing balance and strength impairment. The similar findings at different disease timepoints do not demonstrate that the same disease process is occurring in both conditions. Additionally, cross-sectional data cannot show whether these impairments improve, worsen, or remain stable over time in either population.
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
Hayes, Lawrence D, Sanal-Hayes, Nilihan E M, Mclaughlin, Marie, Berry, Ethan C J, & Sculthorpe, Nicholas F (2025). People with Long Covid and ME/CFS Exhibit Similarly Impaired Balance and Physical Capacity: A Case-Case-Control Study.. The American journal of medicine. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.amjmed.2023.06.028
BibTeX
@article{mecfsatlas-hayes-2025-people-long,
author = {Hayes, Lawrence D and Sanal-Hayes, Nilihan E M and Mclaughlin, Marie and Berry, Ethan C J and Sculthorpe, Nicholas F},
title = {People with Long Covid and ME/CFS Exhibit Similarly Impaired Balance and Physical Capacity: A Case-Case-Control Study.},
journal = {The American journal of medicine},
year = {2025},
doi = {10.1016/j.amjmed.2023.06.028},
note = {PubMed: 37490948},
url = {https://www.mecfsatlas.com/evidence/hayes-2025-people-long},
}Atlas snapshot reference
ME/CFS Atlas. Generator v1 / Scanner v1.4 / policy v0.1. Accessed 2026-05-27. https://www.mecfsatlas.com/evidence/hayes-2025-people-long
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