McCully, K K, Sisto, S A, Natelson, B H · Sports medicine (Auckland, N.Z.) · 1996 · DOI
This review looks at whether exercise can help people with ME/CFS feel better. While patients often report getting much sicker after even light activity, most studies find their muscles work normally on standard tests. The authors suggest exercise training might help, but caution that avoiding 'relapses' (crashes) is critical, and more research is needed to understand how exercise affects this illness.
This early review highlights a fundamental paradox in ME/CFS—the disconnect between subjective functional impairment and objective muscle/metabolic findings—which remains clinically relevant today. It raises critical questions about post-exertional malaise and exercise safety that continue to inform debate about rehabilitation approaches in ME/CFS.
This review does not establish that exercise is effective or safe for all CFS patients, nor does it prove the underlying mechanism of CFS. It does not demonstrate causation between exercise and symptom improvement, and the mixed findings on mitochondrial function suggest exercise's role may differ across patient subgroups.
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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