Park, Jae-Woong, Park, Byung-Jin, Lee, Jin-Seok et al. · Journal of translational medicine · 2024 · DOI
This study looked at 60 previous clinical trials involving over 7,000 ME/CFS patients to understand how severe their fatigue really is. Researchers converted all the different fatigue measurements used in these trials into a common scale (0-100) so they could compare results. They found that ME/CFS patients experience very high fatigue levels (around 78 out of 100), affecting their thinking, physical abilities, and mood in different ways.
This is the first comprehensive analysis quantifying fatigue severity across ME/CFS research, providing clinicians with evidence-based benchmarks for diagnosis and treatment monitoring. For patients, it validates that the extreme fatigue they experience is a measurable, documented feature of the disease, supporting the need for better therapeutic approaches and improved recognition by healthcare providers.
This study does not establish what causes ME/CFS fatigue or prove that any specific treatment effectively reduces it—it only describes fatigue levels in trials of various interventions. The variation in fatigue scores depending on which measurement tool was used suggests that different scales may capture different aspects of fatigue, so the 'true' severity cannot be pinned to a single number. The review also cannot determine why adolescents show slightly higher fatigue scores than adults or explain the individual factors that influence fatigue severity.
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
Park, Jae-Woong, Park, Byung-Jin, Lee, Jin-Seok, Lee, Eun-Jung, Ahn, Yo-Chan, & Son, Chang-Gue (2024). Systematic review of fatigue severity in ME/CFS patients: insights from randomized controlled trials.. Journal of translational medicine. https://doi.org/10.1186/s12967-024-05349-7
BibTeX
@article{mecfsatlas-park-2024-systematic-review,
author = {Park, Jae-Woong and Park, Byung-Jin and Lee, Jin-Seok and Lee, Eun-Jung and Ahn, Yo-Chan and Son, Chang-Gue},
title = {Systematic review of fatigue severity in ME/CFS patients: insights from randomized controlled trials.},
journal = {Journal of translational medicine},
year = {2024},
doi = {10.1186/s12967-024-05349-7},
note = {PubMed: 38831460},
url = {https://www.mecfsatlas.com/evidence/park-2024-systematic-review},
}Atlas snapshot reference
ME/CFS Atlas. Generator v1 / Scanner v1.4 / policy v0.1. Accessed 2026-05-27. https://www.mecfsatlas.com/evidence/park-2024-systematic-review
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