Skorpen, Elias, Pasca, Nora Bugge, Reitan, Solveig Klæbo et al. · Nordic journal of psychiatry · 2024 · DOI
Researchers compared thyroid hormone levels in women with ME/CFS, women with fibromyalgia, and healthy women to see if thyroid function might explain fatigue. They found no differences in thyroid hormone levels between the groups and no connection between how tired someone felt and their thyroid hormone levels.
Since fatigue is a cardinal feature of ME/CFS and thyroid dysfunction commonly causes fatigue, understanding whether thyroid abnormalities contribute to ME/CFS is clinically important. This negative finding suggests that standard thyroid testing may not explain ME/CFS fatigue and highlights the need for more sophisticated thyroid assessment methods.
This study does not prove that thyroid function is irrelevant to ME/CFS fatigue—it only shows that standard TSH and FT4 measurements within normal ranges do not correlate with fatigue severity. The study cannot rule out dysfunction at the level of thyroid hormone receptors, cellular responsiveness, or tissue-specific thyroid effects that normal blood tests would miss.
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
Skorpen, Elias, Pasca, Nora Bugge, Reitan, Solveig Klæbo, & Groven, Nina (2024). Exploring levels of TSH and FT4 in patients with chronic fatigue syndrome (CFS), fibromyalgia (FM) and healthy controls did not reveal any associations between fatigue score and level of thyroid hormones.. Nordic journal of psychiatry. https://doi.org/10.1080/08039488.2024.2332442
BibTeX
@article{mecfsatlas-skorpen-2024-exploring-levels,
author = {Skorpen, Elias and Pasca, Nora Bugge and Reitan, Solveig Klæbo and Groven, Nina},
title = {Exploring levels of TSH and FT4 in patients with chronic fatigue syndrome (CFS), fibromyalgia (FM) and healthy controls did not reveal any associations between fatigue score and level of thyroid hormones.},
journal = {Nordic journal of psychiatry},
year = {2024},
doi = {10.1080/08039488.2024.2332442},
note = {PubMed: 38557370},
url = {https://www.mecfsatlas.com/evidence/skorpen-2024-exploring-levels},
}Atlas snapshot reference
ME/CFS Atlas. Generator v1 / Scanner v1.4 / policy v0.1. Accessed 2026-05-27. https://www.mecfsatlas.com/evidence/skorpen-2024-exploring-levels
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