Newton, Julia L, Finkelmeyer, Andreas, Petrides, George et al. · Open heart · 2016 · DOI
This study found that people with ME/CFS have smaller hearts and lower blood volumes than healthy people. Interestingly, these differences were not related to how long someone had been sick, suggesting the heart changes are not simply from being inactive. Patients with more severe fatigue tended to have lower plasma volume (the liquid part of blood), which might be a target for future treatment.
This research provides objective physiological evidence that ME/CFS involves measurable cardiac and blood volume abnormalities, moving beyond subjective symptom reporting. The finding that fatigue severity correlates with plasma volume suggests a potentially modifiable biological mechanism, opening avenues for targeted interventions. The lack of association with disease duration challenges deconditioning as the primary cause and suggests these are intrinsic disease features.
This study demonstrates correlation between blood volume and cardiac dimensions, but does not establish causation or the direction of any causal relationship. The observational design cannot determine whether low plasma volume causes reduced cardiac size, or vice versa, or whether both result from a separate underlying mechanism. The relatively small control group (n=10) limits generalizability of between-group comparisons.
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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