Causes of death

Statistics on the causes of death in ME +/or CFS patients vary greatly. Some factors that influence statistics on cause of death include case definitions, regional differences, access to medical resources, and the presence of comorbid illnesses.

Notable Studies

 * 2016, Mortality in patients with myalgic encephalomyelitis and chronic fatigue syndrome (Full Text)
 * 2016, Mortality of people with chronic fatigue syndrome: a retrospective cohort study in England and Wales from the South London and Maudsley NHS Foundation Trust Biomedical Research Centre (SLaM BRC) Clinical Record Interactive Search (CRIS) Register (Emmert Roberts, Simon Wessely, Trudie Chalder, Chin-Kuo Chang, Matthew Hotopf). See also Suicide risk in people with chronic fatigue syndrome. The study has been criticized by James Coyne.
 * 2015, Pathology of Chronic Fatigue Syndrome: Pilot Study of Four Autopsy Cases
 * 2012, Chronic Fatigue Syndrome and subsequent risk of cancer among elderly US adults
 * 2010, Exploring the feasibility of establishing a disease-specific post-mortem tissue bank in the UK: a case study in ME/CFS
 * 2006, Causes of death among patients with chronic fatigue syndrome "Abstract - Chronic fatigue syndrome (CFS) is a debilitating illness affecting thousands of individuals. At the present time, there are few studies that have investigated causes of death for those with this syndrome. The authors analyzed a memorial list tabulated by the National CFIDS Foundation of 166 deceased individuals who had had CFS. There were approximately three times more women than men on the list. The three most prevalent causes of death were heart failure, suicide, and cancer, which accounted for 59.6% of all deaths. The mean age of those who died from cancer and suicide was 47.8 and 39.3 years, respectively, which is considerably younger than those who died from cancer and suicide in the general population. The implications of these findings are discussed."
 * 2006, Mortality in a cohort of chronically fatigued patients"Abstract - BACKGROUND: Comprehensive studies of mortality among patients with chronic fatigue (CF) and chronic fatigue syndrome (CFS) have not been published, but several sources suggest that CFS is associated with an elevated risk for suicide. METHOD: Data on 1201 chronically fatigued patients followed in a university-affiliated tertiary-care clinic for up to 14 years were submitted to the Center for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) National Death Index (NDI) to evaluate all-cause and suicide-caused death rates against standardized mortality rates (SMRs). We used Life Table Analysis to examine the influence of sex and diagnoses of CFS and depression. RESULTS: All-cause mortality in chronically fatigued patients was no higher than expected, but suicide-caused death rates were more than eight times higher than in the US general population. The significant elevation in the SMR of suicide was restricted to those who did not meet criteria for CFS [SMR(CF)=14.2, 95% confidence interval (CI) 5.7-29.3 versus SMR(CFS)=3.6, 95% CI 0.4-12.9]. Among chronically fatigued patients who did not meet CFS criteria, those with a lifetime history of major depression (MD) had higher suicide-caused death rates than among their non-depressed counterparts (SMR(MD)=19.1, 95% CI 7.0-41.5 versus SMR(NMD)=5.6, 95% CI 0.1-31.4), although the difference was not significant. CONCLUSIONS: CFS does not appear to be associated with increased all-cause mortality or suicide rates. Clinicians, however, should carefully evaluate patients with CF for depression and suicidality."

Learn more

 * 2016, Mortality in ME/CFS (ME Research UK)
 * 2016, Chronic Fatigue and Suicide: An Alarming Trend
 * 2012, Update on the ME/CFS Tissue and Post Mortem Tissue Bank (ME Association)