Cardiopulmonary exercise test results do not change over two sequential days in patients with chronic fatigue syndrome.
Mancini, Donna M, Cook, Dane B, Brunjes, Danielle L et al.·Frontiers in physiology·2026
Researchers asked whether doing two exercise tests on consecutive days could reliably detect post-exertional malaise (PEM) in ME/CFS patients. They found that oxygen consumption and other key exercise measures did not change between Day 1 and Day 2 in either ME/CFS patients or healthy controls. However, ME/CFS patients reported much greater fatigue during exercise and had lower maximum heart rates. One study's findings do not establish whether this two-day test method is truly useful for measuring PEM in clinical practice.