Banihashemi, Zahra-Sadat, Azizi-Fini, Ismail, Rajabi, Mahdi et al. · BMJ supportive & palliative care · 2025 · DOI
Researchers tested whether Astragalus root extract, a herbal supplement, could help nurses with post-COVID chronic fatigue. Half the nurses received the supplement (500 mg twice daily) and half received a placebo, and fatigue levels were measured before, at the end, and one month after treatment. The group taking Astragalus showed significant improvements in fatigue symptoms, while the placebo group did not improve as much.
Post-COVID ME/CFS affects quality of life substantially, and currently no approved pharmacological treatments exist; exploring herbal interventions with mechanistic plausibility could expand therapeutic options if replicated. For healthcare workers disproportionately affected by post-COVID fatigue, accessible and relatively low-cost herbal remedies warrant investigation.
This study does not establish Astragalus as an effective treatment for ME/CFS broadly—it examined post-COVID fatigue in a specific occupational cohort (nurses) and does not clarify whether improvements reflect disease modification, symptom masking, or placebo response amplification in a motivated population. The study does not address whether results would generalize to non-healthcare workers or to ME/CFS from other aetiologies. Long-term safety and optimal dosing remain unestablished.
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 →
Spotted an error in this entry? Report it →