Wilson, Jo Ellen, Gurdasani, Deepti, Helbok, Raimund et al. · Nature reviews. Disease primers · 2025 · DOI
Long COVID is a condition that develops after COVID-19 infection and causes ongoing symptoms for at least 3 months. People with Long COVID commonly experience brain fog, memory problems, anxiety, depression, headaches, sleep issues, and severe exhaustion after physical activity. This review explains what we know about what causes these symptoms and why treatment needs to be personalized based on each person's unique symptoms.
This comprehensive review is important for ME/CFS patients and researchers because Long COVID shares significant clinical and mechanistic overlap with ME/CFS, including post-exertional malaise, cognitive dysfunction, and autonomic symptoms. Understanding the diverse pathophysiological mechanisms proposed for Long COVID may illuminate similar underlying processes in ME/CFS and help guide toward more effective, personalized treatment strategies.
As a narrative review rather than a primary research study, this does not provide new experimental data or definitively prove causation between any proposed mechanism and Long COVID symptoms. The review synthesizes existing literature on mechanisms but does not establish which mechanisms are primary drivers versus secondary consequences, nor does it provide evidence specific to ME/CFS populations.
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
Wilson, Jo Ellen, Gurdasani, Deepti, Helbok, Raimund, Ozturk, Serefnur, Fraser, Douglas D, Filipović, Saša R, et al. (2025). COVID-19-associated neurological and psychological manifestations.. Nature reviews. Disease primers. https://doi.org/10.1038/s41572-025-00674-7
BibTeX
@article{mecfsatlas-wilson-2025-covid-associated,
author = {Wilson, Jo Ellen and Gurdasani, Deepti and Helbok, Raimund and Ozturk, Serefnur and Fraser, Douglas D and Filipović, Saša R and Peluso, Michael J and Iwasaki, Akiko and Yasuda, Clarissa Lin and Bocci, Tommaso and Priori, Alberto and Altmann, Daniel and Alwan, Nisreen A and Wesley Ely, E},
title = {COVID-19-associated neurological and psychological manifestations.},
journal = {Nature reviews. Disease primers},
year = {2025},
doi = {10.1038/s41572-025-00674-7},
note = {PubMed: 41444262},
url = {https://www.mecfsatlas.com/evidence/wilson-2025-covid-associated},
}Atlas snapshot reference
ME/CFS Atlas. Generator v1 / Scanner v1.4 / policy v0.1. Accessed 2026-05-25. https://www.mecfsatlas.com/evidence/wilson-2025-covid-associated
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