Hyland, Michael E, Lanario, Joseph W, Wei, Yinghui et al. · Immunity, inflammation and disease · 2019 · DOI
This study found that people with severe asthma report many symptoms beyond breathing problems—such as fatigue, pain, and digestive issues—that are very similar to symptoms seen in fibromyalgia and chronic fatigue syndrome. The researchers compared symptom patterns between asthma patients and people with various functional disorders, finding that asthma and fibromyalgia symptoms were 75% similar in type and pattern. This suggests these conditions may share common underlying mechanisms related to how the body's systems interact.
This study is important because it suggests ME/CFS and other functional disorders may share common underlying mechanisms with systemic manifestations of severe asthma, potentially opening new avenues for understanding and treating ME/CFS's multi-system symptoms. The high symptom pattern similarity (0.69 with ME/CFS) supports network-based models of functional disorders and could inform clinical approaches and research priorities for ME/CFS.
This study does not prove that asthma causes ME/CFS or fibromyalgia, nor does it establish the direction of causality or shared biological mechanisms. The internet-based recruitment for functional disorder groups introduces selection bias and may not represent undiagnosed populations. Cross-sectional design cannot determine whether symptom similarity reflects shared pathophysiology, shared triggers, or coincidental overlap.
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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