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 →
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