Steen, Olivier D, Bos, Martje, van Ockenburg, Sonja L et al. · BMC medicine · 2025 · DOI
This study found that ME/CFS, fibromyalgia, and irritable bowel syndrome tend to run in families alongside conditions like depression, anxiety, autoimmune diseases, and metabolic disorders. Researchers analyzed data from over 166,000 people in a Dutch population cohort to understand whether these conditions share common inherited risk factors. The findings suggest that the causes of functional disorders like ME/CFS may overlap with the causes of immune and metabolic diseases, which could point to new treatment approaches.
This is one of the first large-scale studies demonstrating that ME/CFS shares familial risk factors with both immune-related and cardiometabolic diseases, strengthening the biological basis for understanding ME/CFS as part of a broader disease network. The findings support the hypothesis that systemic mechanisms underlying immune dysfunction and metabolic abnormalities may be relevant to ME/CFS pathology, opening avenues for investigating shared biological pathways and identifying novel therapeutic targets.
This study demonstrates familial co-aggregation but does not establish causation or direction of causation between these conditions. It does not identify which specific genetic or environmental factors are shared, nor does it confirm whether ME/CFS causes cardiometabolic disease or vice versa. Self-reported diagnoses without systematic clinical confirmation may have introduced misclassification bias that could affect the strength of observed associations.
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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