Bornstein, Stefan R, Voit-Bak, Karin, Donate, Timo et al. · Molecular psychiatry · 2022 · DOI
Some people who had COVID-19 continue to experience fatigue and breathing problems long after recovering from the infection, a condition called long-COVID. This pattern of ongoing symptoms looks similar to ME/CFS, another condition that causes persistent fatigue. Researchers found that both conditions may involve the body producing antibodies (immune proteins) that attack certain nerve receptors. A treatment called extracorporeal apheresis, which filters blood to remove these harmful antibodies, showed promise in improving symptoms in ME/CFS patients and might also help those with long-COVID.
This study highlights a potentially treatable autoimmune mechanism common to both ME/CFS and long-COVID, offering hope for a targeted therapy that may benefit thousands of patients. The proposed connection between these conditions could accelerate research and clinical understanding of ME/CFS pathogenesis. If validated in clinical trials, extracorporeal apheresis could represent a meaningful therapeutic option for patients with otherwise limited treatment options.
This review does not provide new clinical trial data proving that apheresis is effective for post-COVID or ME/CFS patients—it proposes the mechanism and existing ME/CFS data as rationale for further investigation. The study does not establish causation between the identified autoantibodies and symptoms; correlation alone is presented. The article does not definitively prove that post-COVID and ME/CFS share identical pathogenic mechanisms, only that similarities exist.
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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