Common symptoms in ME/CFS

Common symptoms of myalgic encephalomyelitis and chronic fatigue syndrome include post-exertional malaise, multiple types of fatigue, and a range of neurological, cardiovascular, energy metabolism and endocrine symptoms.

Symptom recognition


Canadian Consensus Criteria (Appendix 4).

Castro-Marrero et al. 2017
Comorbidity in Chronic Fatigue Syndrome/Myalgic Encephalomyelitis: A Nationwide Population-Based Cohort Study
 * 1757 Spanish subjects who met both the 1994 CDC/Fukuda definition and Canadian Consensus Criteria for CFS/ME. Table 2 gives prevelance of each ME/CFS symptom in the Canadian Consensus Criteria

Jason et. al 2014
Examining case definition criteria for chronic fatigue syndrome and myalgic encephalomyelitis
 * 236 patients completed the DePaul Symptom Questionnaire, rating the frequency and severity of 54 symptoms, compared to controls.

de Becker et al. 2010
A definition-based analysis of symptoms in a large cohort of patients with chronic fatigue syndrome 1578 CFS patients fulfilled the Fukuda criteria (called the "CFS group") and 951 (60.3% of the CFS group) fulfilled the Holmes criteria. The Holmes definition was found to be better than the Fukuda at differentiated CFS patients from the patients with Chronic Fatigue without CFS.
 * A study of 2073 patients complaining of chronic fatigue (CF) in Brussels. Table 1 and Table 2 show the how many patients had each symptom according to whether they met the Fukuda criteria, the Holmes criteria or had chronic fatigue without CFS.

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