Causes of death

Statistics on the causes of death of myalgic encephalomyalitis (ME) and/or chronic fatigue syndrome (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.

Age of deaths due to ME/CFS
In England and Wales, most people whose deaths were caused fully or partly by ME/CFS were of working age, with the youngest dying their late teens.

Deaths from ME/CFS are very rare, and ME/CFS is rarely recorded on death certificates. In England and Wales, between 2001 and 2016, 88 death certificates stated that the death was either partly or fully caused by myalgic encephalomyelitis/chronic fatigue syndrome, which is less than six deaths per year.

Notable Studies

 * 2006, Causes of death among patients with chronic fatigue syndrome
 * 2006, Mortality in a cohort of chronically fatigued patients (Abstract)
 * 2010, Exploring the feasibility of establishing a disease-specific post-mortem tissue bank in the UK: a case study in ME/CFS
 * 2012, Chronic Fatigue Syndrome and subsequent risk of cancer among elderly US adults
 * 2015, Pathology of Chronic Fatigue Syndrome: Pilot Study of Four Autopsy Cases
 * 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.

Learn more

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