Kuut, Tanja A, Müller, Fabiola, Braamse, Annemarie M J et al. · Behavioural and cognitive psychotherapy · 2025 · DOI
This study tested whether cognitive behavioral therapy (CBT)—a type of talk therapy that helps people change unhelpful thinking patterns and behaviors—could help teenagers with severe fatigue after COVID-19. Five teenagers received CBT over 12 weeks. By the end, all five were no longer severely fatigued, most felt less physically limited, and all were able to return to school without absences.
Post-COVID fatigue in adolescents overlaps clinically with ME/CFS, and this is one of the first studies to evaluate a structured psychological intervention for this population. For ME/CFS patients and researchers, this work addresses the critical gap of evidence-based treatments for severe fatigue in young people and provides preliminary data on whether CBT—widely used in fatigue disorders—may be feasible and beneficial.
This study does not prove that CBT is effective for all adolescents with post-COVID fatigue or ME/CFS, as it lacks a control or comparison group, involves only five patients, and relies on self-report measures without objective biomarkers. The improvements could reflect natural recovery, placebo effects, or regression to the mean rather than the specific effects of CBT. Long-term sustainability of improvements beyond the 12-week treatment period is unknown.
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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