Sanal-Hayes, Nilihan E M, Mclaughlin, Marie, Hayes, Lawrence D et al. · The American journal of medicine · 2025 · DOI
This study compared how people with long COVID and ME/CFS experience their daily well-being and thinking abilities, compared to healthy people of similar ages. Researchers found that both long COVID and ME/CFS patients reported similar struggles with fatigue, pain, sleep problems, anxiety, and difficulty with everyday activities—but their actual test performance on thinking tasks was comparable to healthy controls. The findings suggest that both conditions affect quality of life in very similar ways.
This is the first direct comparison of well-being and cognitive function between long COVID and ME/CFS, demonstrating that despite different illness durations, both conditions produce similar patient-reported impacts on quality of life. Understanding these parallels could inform treatment strategies and validate long COVID patients' experiences while highlighting the urgent need for interventions addressing well-being in both populations.
This study does not prove that long COVID and ME/CFS are identical conditions or have the same underlying biological mechanisms—only that they produce similar symptomatic profiles at these timepoints. It does not establish whether objective cognitive impairment exists that standard tests cannot detect, nor does it determine whether longer illness duration in ME/CFS leads to psychological adaptation or genuine stability. The cross-sectional design cannot establish causality or predict how long COVID patients will fare at longer illness durations.
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
Sanal-Hayes, Nilihan E M, Mclaughlin, Marie, Hayes, Lawrence D, Berry, Ethan C J, & Sculthorpe, Nicholas F (2025). Examining Well-Being and Cognitive Function in People With Long COVID and ME/CFS, and Age-Matched Healthy Controls: A Case-Case-Control Study.. The American journal of medicine. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.amjmed.2024.04.041
BibTeX
@article{mecfsatlas-sanal-hayes-2025-examining-well,
author = {Sanal-Hayes, Nilihan E M and Mclaughlin, Marie and Hayes, Lawrence D and Berry, Ethan C J and Sculthorpe, Nicholas F},
title = {Examining Well-Being and Cognitive Function in People With Long COVID and ME/CFS, and Age-Matched Healthy Controls: A Case-Case-Control Study.},
journal = {The American journal of medicine},
year = {2025},
doi = {10.1016/j.amjmed.2024.04.041},
note = {PubMed: 38750713},
url = {https://www.mecfsatlas.com/evidence/sanal-hayes-2025-examining-well},
}Atlas snapshot reference
ME/CFS Atlas. Generator v1 / Scanner v1.4 / policy v0.1. Accessed 2026-05-30. https://www.mecfsatlas.com/evidence/sanal-hayes-2025-examining-well
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