Porter, Nicole, Jason, Leonard A · Neuropsychiatric disease and treatment · 2022 · DOI
This review examines whether mindfulness meditation—a practice involving focused attention and relaxation—might help people with Long COVID and ME/CFS. The authors looked at existing research showing that meditation can reduce fatigue and sleep problems, and may help calm inflammation in the body after viral infections. They suggest that meditation could be a helpful tool to manage symptoms and potentially address some of the underlying biological problems in these conditions.
This review is important because it explores a potential non-pharmacological intervention for ME/CFS and Long COVID, conditions with limited approved treatments. Understanding whether meditation might address both symptoms and underlying immune dysfunction could offer patients an accessible, low-cost complementary strategy. The focus on potential mechanisms—rather than just symptom relief—helps researchers think about how behavioral interventions might interact with the biological abnormalities seen in these conditions.
This is a literature review, not a new clinical trial, so it does not prove that meditation actually works for ME/CFS patients through rigorous experimental evidence. The review cannot establish whether improvements are due to meditation itself or to placebo effects, regression to the mean, or other factors. The authors do not present their own data showing that meditation changes gene expression or immune markers in ME/CFS populations specifically.
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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Primary citation
Porter, Nicole & Jason, Leonard A (2022). Mindfulness Meditation Interventions for Long COVID: Biobehavioral Gene Expression and Neuroimmune Functioning.. Neuropsychiatric disease and treatment. https://doi.org/10.2147/NDT.S379653
BibTeX
@article{mecfsatlas-porter-2022-mindfulness-meditation,
author = {Porter, Nicole and Jason, Leonard A},
title = {Mindfulness Meditation Interventions for Long COVID: Biobehavioral Gene Expression and Neuroimmune Functioning.},
journal = {Neuropsychiatric disease and treatment},
year = {2022},
doi = {10.2147/NDT.S379653},
note = {PubMed: 36387947},
url = {https://www.mecfsatlas.com/evidence/porter-2022-mindfulness-meditation},
}Atlas snapshot reference
ME/CFS Atlas. Generator v1 / Scanner v1.4 / policy v0.1. Accessed 2026-05-28. https://www.mecfsatlas.com/evidence/porter-2022-mindfulness-meditation
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