Kumor, Klaudiusz, Pierzchała, Krystyna · Wiadomosci lekarskie (Warsaw, Poland : 1960) · 2006
Fatigue is an extremely common and often severely disabling symptom in many neurological disorders, affecting 40–90% of patients with conditions like multiple sclerosis, Parkinson's disease, and stroke. This review explains that fatigue is a real medical symptom that should be carefully distinguished from depression, weakness, and sleepiness, though these conditions often occur together. Currently, doctors assess fatigue mainly through patient questionnaires, and there is no clear biological test or proven cure—treatments focus on addressing the underlying disease and using behavioral and psychological approaches.
This review is relevant to ME/CFS because it highlights the prominence of unexplained fatigue across neurological conditions and underscores the diagnostic and pathophysiological challenges that ME/CFS shares with other disorders. It emphasizes that fatigue remains poorly understood at a biological level and that current medical approaches rely heavily on symptom management rather than mechanism-targeted interventions, a situation that mirrors ME/CFS research gaps.
This review does not establish the specific causes of fatigue in any individual disorder, nor does it provide evidence for particular biomarkers or pathophysiological mechanisms. It cannot prove whether fatigue in different neurological conditions shares a common underlying biology or whether distinct mechanisms operate in each disease. The study also does not evaluate the efficacy of proposed treatments through controlled trials.
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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