Banovic, Ingrid, Šaban, Iva, Ayad, Adel et al. · Neuropsychology · 2025 · DOI
This study tested whether people with ME/CFS have trouble focusing their attention or simply process information more slowly. Researchers gave 83 ME/CFS patients and 83 healthy people a simple attention test (the Stroop task) where they had to name colors while ignoring conflicting words. The results showed that ME/CFS patients were slower overall, but their difficulty wasn't due to problems with attention—it was purely because their brains processed information more slowly.
Understanding the specific nature of cognitive problems in ME/CFS is important because it helps clarify what's actually impaired and informs potential treatments. This study provides rigorous evidence that ME/CFS-related cognitive dysfunction primarily involves slowed processing rather than attention problems, which has implications for how patients manage daily activities and how researchers should design cognitive interventions.
This study does not explain why information processing is slowed in ME/CFS or whether slowing is related to other ME/CFS symptoms like post-exertional malaise. The cross-sectional design cannot establish causation, and the findings are specific to the Stroop task—cognitive impairment in other domains (memory, executive function) remains to be tested. The study also does not clarify whether processing speed differences vary by disease severity or duration.
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 →
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