Kedor, Claudia, Freitag, Helma, Meyer-Arndt, Lil et al. · Nature communications · 2022 · DOI
This study followed 42 people with long-lasting fatigue after COVID-19 infection for six months and compared them to people with similar chronic fatigue from other causes. Most participants experienced moderate to severe fatigue that interfered with daily life. The researchers found that many of these post-COVID patients had reduced hand grip strength and blood markers suggesting possible inflammation and poor blood flow, which may help explain why their bodies struggle to recover.
This study demonstrates that a substantial proportion of post-COVID patients develop ME/CFS-like illness indistinguishable in severity from classical ME/CFS, helping validate post-COVID-19 fatigue as a legitimate clinical entity. The identification of specific biomarkers associated with symptom severity provides potential biological markers to guide future treatment development and could help distinguish post-COVID ME/CFS from other fatigue conditions.
This study does not prove that inflammation and hypoperfusion cause ME/CFS symptoms—only that they are associated with symptom severity. The small sample size and observational design limit generalizability and cannot establish whether these biomarkers are causes, consequences, or coincidental findings. Cross-sectional biomarker measurement does not establish temporal relationships or causal 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 →
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