Similar ME/CFS symptoms seem to follow a small percentage of patients recovering from a whole range of infections.
Myalgic encephalomyelitis/chronic fatigue syndrome is no more prevalent in people recovering from covid than after other acute illnesses, a US study suggests.
With a rate of around 4%, however, that still leaves a large burden of morbidity and medical care following the pandemic, say the authors of the study, published in JAMA Network Open.
Under the umbrella of INSPIRE (the Innovative Support for Patients with SARS-CoV-2 Infections Registry), the team recruited nearly 4400 people at multiple sites who were tested for covid over nearly two years from December 2020 and followed them up with four surveys over a year.
Participants reported their result and were asked about ME/CFS/long covid symptoms including “activity limitations associated with fatigue, postexertional malaise and sleep problems as well as either cognitive impairment or orthostatic intolerance”. (The authors acknowledge that self-reported symptoms meeting criteria do not amount to a full clinical diagnosis of ME/CFS but only “ME/CFS-like illness”.)
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Three months from their tests, 3.4% of the covid-positive group and 3.7% of the covid-negative group met ME/CFS criteria.
There was no statistically significant difference in ME/CFS prevalence by covid status at any time point. Over the year of follow-up, prevalence ranged from 2.8%-3.7% in the positive group and 3.1%-4.5% in the negative group.
“Increasingly, ME/CFS is recognised as a chronic sequela of a variety of infections,” the authors write, citing a longitudinal Taiwanese study that showed “an elevated risk of CFS following infection with varicella-zoster virus, Mycobacterium tuberculosis, Escherichia coli, Staphylococcus aureus, influenza virus, and Borrelia burgdorferi”.
“Given that there are over 100 million confirmed cases of covid-19 illness in the US, the prevalence of ME/CFS-like illness in our study represents a high absolute proportion of individuals possibly affected with ME/CFS associated with covid-19 (2.8-3.6 million individuals).”
