Campos, Maria Cristine, Nery, Tatyana, Starke, Ana Carolina et al. · Neuroscience and biobehavioral reviews · 2022 · DOI
This review looked at how doctors and researchers measure fatigue in people who have long-term tiredness after COVID-19. The study found that fatigue after COVID-19 is common and can affect thinking, mood, and physical abilities. The researchers identified different tools—questionnaires and performance tests—that can help measure how tired someone feels and how much their tiredness limits their daily activities.
This review is important for ME/CFS research because post-COVID fatigue shares significant clinical features with ME/CFS, including multisystem impairment and unclear pathophysiology. Establishing standardized assessment tools across cognitive, physical, and psychological domains could improve diagnosis and enable better comparison of fatigue mechanisms across post-viral conditions. This work supports the development of comprehensive evaluation approaches applicable to ME/CFS populations.
This review does not establish the underlying mechanisms causing post-COVID fatigue, nor does it prove causality between specific physiological abnormalities and fatigue symptoms. The review summarizes existing assessment tools but does not demonstrate which tools are most sensitive, specific, or predictive of functional outcomes. It does not compare the natural history or severity of post-COVID fatigue directly to ME/CFS.
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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