Schnall, Jesse, Oliver, Georgina, Braat, Sabine et al. · The Australian and New Zealand journal of psychiatry · 2022 · DOI
Researchers studied 29 Australian patients who believed their symptoms were caused by tick bites. Most had severe tiredness, headaches, and joint pain, and many had previously been diagnosed with conditions like ME/CFS or fibromyalgia. When doctors tested these patients, they found no evidence of Lyme disease or other common infections from ticks. The study suggests that tick-attributed illness in Australia remains unexplained and may overlap with other medically unexplained conditions.
This is the first systematic characterization of tick-attributed illness in Australia, directly relevant to ME/CFS research because of the high overlap in symptom profiles, diagnostic criteria, and classification as medically unexplained syndromes. Understanding how patients with similar debilitating symptoms are evaluated and managed across different diagnostic frameworks can inform research into shared mechanisms and improve diagnostic approaches for ME/CFS.
This study does not prove that tick-attributed symptoms are psychosomatic or non-organic; the absence of evidence for known infections does not exclude novel pathogens, post-infectious sequelae, or biological processes not captured by current testing. The retrospective design and lack of control group limit causal inference about any relationship between tick exposure and symptom onset. Benefit from antimicrobials in some patients cannot establish infectious causation without controlled designs.
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
Schnall, Jesse, Oliver, Georgina, Braat, Sabine, Macdonell, Richard, Gibney, Katherine B, & Kanaan, Richard A (2022). Characterising DSCATT: A case series of Australian patients with debilitating symptom complexes attributed to ticks.. The Australian and New Zealand journal of psychiatry. https://doi.org/10.1177/00048674211043788
BibTeX
@article{mecfsatlas-schnall-2022-characterising-dscatt,
author = {Schnall, Jesse and Oliver, Georgina and Braat, Sabine and Macdonell, Richard and Gibney, Katherine B and Kanaan, Richard A},
title = {Characterising DSCATT: A case series of Australian patients with debilitating symptom complexes attributed to ticks.},
journal = {The Australian and New Zealand journal of psychiatry},
year = {2022},
doi = {10.1177/00048674211043788},
note = {PubMed: 34465249},
url = {https://www.mecfsatlas.com/evidence/schnall-2022-characterising-dscatt},
}Atlas snapshot reference
ME/CFS Atlas. Generator v1 / Scanner v1.4 / policy v0.1. Accessed 2026-05-27. https://www.mecfsatlas.com/evidence/schnall-2022-characterising-dscatt
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