Loades, Maria E, Rimes, Katharine A, Ali, Sheila et al. · Child: care, health and development · 2019 · DOI
This study asked whether parents of teenagers with ME/CFS experience similar levels of tiredness and emotional distress as their children. Researchers surveyed 115 adolescents with ME/CFS, along with their mothers and fathers, about fatigue, mood, anxiety, and how well the family was functioning. The main finding was that parents' own tiredness and distress were not directly linked to how severe their child's illness was, but family stress and poor coping skills were connected to teenagers feeling more depressed.
Understanding the relationship between parental wellbeing and family dynamics in ME/CFS is important for developing family-centered interventions. This study expands previous mother-focused research by examining fathers and suggests that family functioning and parental distress may be valuable clinical targets alongside disease management in adolescents with ME/CFS.
This cross-sectional study cannot establish whether parental distress causes poor family functioning, results from it, or whether both are caused by external factors. It does not prove that parental fatigue severity is irrelevant to adolescent outcomes—the lack of correlation may reflect that parents' personal fatigue operates independently from disease burden. The finding that adolescent fatigue correlated with better maternal-rated family functioning is counterintuitive and may reflect measurement artifact or selection bias rather than a true causal relationship.
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
Loades, Maria E, Rimes, Katharine A, Ali, Sheila, Lievesley, Kate, & Chalder, Trudie (2019). Does fatigue and distress in a clinical cohort of adolescents with chronic fatigue syndrome correlate with fatigue and distress in their parents?. Child: care, health and development. https://doi.org/10.1111/cch.12626
BibTeX
@article{mecfsatlas-loades-2019-does-fatigue,
author = {Loades, Maria E and Rimes, Katharine A and Ali, Sheila and Lievesley, Kate and Chalder, Trudie},
title = {Does fatigue and distress in a clinical cohort of adolescents with chronic fatigue syndrome correlate with fatigue and distress in their parents?},
journal = {Child: care, health and development},
year = {2019},
doi = {10.1111/cch.12626},
note = {PubMed: 30342433},
url = {https://www.mecfsatlas.com/evidence/loades-2019-does-fatigue},
}Atlas snapshot reference
ME/CFS Atlas. Generator v1 / Scanner v1.4 / policy v0.1. Accessed 2026-05-27. https://www.mecfsatlas.com/evidence/loades-2019-does-fatigue
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