Coplan, Jeremy, Singh, Deepan, Gopinath, Srinath et al. · The Journal of neuropsychiatry and clinical neurosciences · 2015 · DOI
Researchers found that people with anxiety disorders often experience multiple related physical and mental health conditions together—including joint looseness, chronic pain, immune problems, and mood disorders. They studied 76 patients and discovered that over 80% had panic attacks, fibromyalgia, and depression at the same time. This suggests these conditions may be connected as part of a larger syndrome rather than separate illnesses.
This study is important because many ME/CFS patients experience overlapping anxiety, pain, immune dysfunction, and mood symptoms; recognizing these as part of a unified syndrome could improve clinical recognition and treatment approaches. The identification of CFS–bipolar II association specifically highlights comorbidity patterns relevant to the ME/CFS population that warrant further investigation.
This study does not establish causality—it only shows that these conditions co-occur in the same patients. The cross-sectional design means we cannot determine whether anxiety triggers physical symptoms, physical illness causes psychiatric symptoms, or a shared underlying mechanism drives all of them. The lack of a healthy control group also means we cannot determine if this clustering is specific to ALPIM or common in the general population.
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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