Loiacono, Bernardo, Sunnquist, Madison, Nicholson, Laura et al. · Chronic illness · 2022 · DOI
This study compared how active children with ME/CFS are compared to healthy children. Researchers used activity tracking devices and asked children to report their own activity levels. Children with ME/CFS were less active overall and had unusual sleep-wake patterns, with more activity at night and delayed activity during the day. The good news is that children with ME/CFS could accurately report their own activity levels.
Most ME/CFS research focuses on adults, making pediatric activity data critically important for understanding disease presentation in children and developing age-appropriate clinical management strategies. Objective documentation of reduced activity and abnormal circadian patterns supports the biological basis of ME/CFS and can inform school accommodations, pacing interventions, and medical understanding of the condition.
This study does not prove that reduced activity causes ME/CFS symptoms or vice versa—it only documents an association. The cross-sectional design cannot establish whether abnormal activity patterns precede symptom onset or result from post-exertional malaise. It does not measure the relationship between activity fluctuations and symptom severity in individual patients 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
Loiacono, Bernardo, Sunnquist, Madison, Nicholson, Laura, & Jason, Leonard A (2022). Activity measurement in pediatric chronic fatigue syndrome.. Chronic illness. https://doi.org/10.1177/1742395320949613
BibTeX
@article{mecfsatlas-loiacono-2022-activity-measurement,
author = {Loiacono, Bernardo and Sunnquist, Madison and Nicholson, Laura and Jason, Leonard A},
title = {Activity measurement in pediatric chronic fatigue syndrome.},
journal = {Chronic illness},
year = {2022},
doi = {10.1177/1742395320949613},
note = {PubMed: 32806955},
url = {https://www.mecfsatlas.com/evidence/loiacono-2022-activity-measurement},
}Atlas snapshot reference
ME/CFS Atlas. Generator v1 / Scanner v1.4 / policy v0.1. Accessed 2026-05-30. https://www.mecfsatlas.com/evidence/loiacono-2022-activity-measurement
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