Jason, Leonard A, Taylor, Renee R, Kennedy, Cara L et al. · Women & health · 2003 · DOI
This study looked at people with ME/CFS living in the Chicago community rather than only those seeking care at hospitals or specialist clinics. Researchers randomly interviewed nearly 19,000 people, identified those with chronic fatigue and at least four typical ME/CFS symptoms, and had doctors confirm who actually had the condition. They found that ME/CFS patients with different symptom patterns had different levels of disability and came from different demographic backgrounds.
Most ME/CFS research focuses on patients already in the healthcare system, who may be sicker or different from people living with the condition in the community. This study provides a more representative picture of ME/CFS by recruiting from the general population, helping researchers and doctors better understand how diverse this condition truly is and how symptoms vary among affected individuals.
This study identifies symptom subtypes and associations with disability but does not establish cause-and-effect relationships or explain why certain groups experience different symptom patterns. It also cannot prove that community-based samples are universally more representative than clinic samples, as selection bias may still occur even in community recruitment. The cross-sectional design captures only a single time point and cannot track how symptoms or disability change over time.
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
Jason, Leonard A, Taylor, Renee R, Kennedy, Cara L, Jordan, Karen M, Song, Sharon, Johnson, Danielle, et al. (2003). Chronic fatigue syndrome: symptom subtypes in a community based sample.. Women & health. https://doi.org/10.1300/J013v37n01_01
BibTeX
@article{mecfsatlas-jason-2003-chronic-fatigue,
author = {Jason, Leonard A and Taylor, Renee R and Kennedy, Cara L and Jordan, Karen M and Song, Sharon and Johnson, Danielle and Torres-Harding, Susan},
title = {Chronic fatigue syndrome: symptom subtypes in a community based sample.},
journal = {Women & health},
year = {2003},
doi = {10.1300/J013v37n01_01},
note = {PubMed: 12627607},
url = {https://www.mecfsatlas.com/evidence/jason-2003-chronic-fatigue},
}Atlas snapshot reference
ME/CFS Atlas. Generator v1 / Scanner v1.4 / policy v0.1. Accessed 2026-05-28. https://www.mecfsatlas.com/evidence/jason-2003-chronic-fatigue
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