Kunasegaran, Kaveena, Ismail, Ahamed Miflah Hussain, Ramasamy, Shamala et al. · PeerJ · 2023 · DOI
Mental fatigue is a common problem that makes it harder to concentrate, process information, and make decisions. Currently, doctors mainly ask patients to describe their fatigue using questionnaires, which can be unreliable because people's answers are subjective. This review compared different methods of detecting mental fatigue—including questionnaires, heart rate measurements, stress hormones, brain scans, and eye movement tests—to find the most objective and accurate tool.
ME/CFS patients often struggle with cognitive dysfunction and post-exertional malaise that are poorly captured by current subjective assessment tools. Developing more objective, reliable detection methods for mental fatigue could improve early identification of fatigue-related conditions and prevent progression to chronic disorders. Better biomarkers may also help clinicians distinguish between different types of fatigue and tailor interventions more effectively.
This review does not establish that mental fatigue causes ME/CFS, only that early detection of mental fatigue might prevent chronic fatigue syndrome development—a theoretical link that requires prospective studies. It does not provide primary data comparing these methods in ME/CFS populations specifically, and does not prove that any single method is definitively superior without further validation research. The study is methodological in nature and cannot determine which detection tool should be adopted clinically.
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 →
Spotted an error in this entry? Report it →