Carpallo-Porcar, Beatriz, Beamonte, Esther Del Corral, Jiménez-Sánchez, Carolina et al. · Reports (MDPI) · 2025 · DOI
This study tested whether people recovering from COVID-19 could improve their symptoms through home-based exercise and education delivered via video appointments over 12 weeks. Most patients improved in fatigue, exercise capacity, and muscle strength, though breathlessness did not improve as much. The results suggest that remote rehabilitation programs delivered from home may be helpful for people with long COVID symptoms.
This study is relevant to ME/CFS because post-COVID condition shares phenotypic overlap with ME/CFS, including post-exertional malaise, fatigue, and dyspnea. The telerehabilitation approach offers a scalable, accessible model for homebound patients who may be too symptomatic to attend clinic-based rehabilitation, and demonstrates that structured multimodal intervention can produce measurable improvements in objective and subjective outcomes.
This small case series (n=12) cannot establish efficacy or safety of telerehabilitation as standard treatment for post-COVID condition or ME/CFS, as it lacks a control group and has no comparison arm. The lack of improvement in dyspnea despite respiratory strength gains raises questions about whether the intervention addresses the underlying pathophysiology. The study also cannot determine whether improvements are due to the telerehabilitation itself, natural recovery, placebo effect, or patient selection bias.
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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