Wu, Kang, Zou, Yihuai, Li, Yuanyuan et al. · Frontiers in neuroscience · 2025 · DOI
Researchers used specialized brain imaging to compare 37 people with ME/CFS to 34 healthy people and found that certain areas of the brain's outer layer are thinner in patients with ME/CFS. These thinner areas were linked to how severe their fatigue, pain, and reduced quality of life were. The study suggests that ME/CFS may involve physical changes in brain structure that could help explain why patients experience such debilitating fatigue.
This study provides neuroimaging evidence of structural brain changes in ME/CFS, which could help establish the biological basis of the disease and support clinical diagnosis. Understanding which brain regions are affected and how their structural changes relate to symptom severity advances the field's ability to objectively measure disease pathology.
This study does not prove that cortical atrophy causes ME/CFS symptoms—it only shows an association. The cross-sectional design cannot establish whether brain changes develop as a result of the disease, precede it, or occur simultaneously. The 70% classifier accuracy, while meaningful, indicates this is not yet a reliable diagnostic tool on its own.
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
Wu, Kang, Zou, Yihuai, Li, Yuanyuan, Hu, Xiaojie, Wang, Yahui, Chen, Tianzhu, et al. (2025). Multiple voxel pattern analysis shows associations between chronic fatigue syndrome and cortical atrophy.. Frontiers in neuroscience. https://doi.org/10.3389/fnins.2025.1535088
BibTeX
@article{mecfsatlas-wu-2025-multiple-voxel,
author = {Wu, Kang and Zou, Yihuai and Li, Yuanyuan and Hu, Xiaojie and Wang, Yahui and Chen, Tianzhu and Chen, Yuhang and Li, Kuangshi},
title = {Multiple voxel pattern analysis shows associations between chronic fatigue syndrome and cortical atrophy.},
journal = {Frontiers in neuroscience},
year = {2025},
doi = {10.3389/fnins.2025.1535088},
note = {PubMed: 40165832},
url = {https://www.mecfsatlas.com/evidence/wu-2025-multiple-voxel},
}Atlas snapshot reference
ME/CFS Atlas. Generator v1 / Scanner v1.4 / policy v0.1. Accessed 2026-05-28. https://www.mecfsatlas.com/evidence/wu-2025-multiple-voxel
Contribute
Private, reviewed by a human. Not a public comment thread.