Clinical Heterogeneity in ME/CFS. A Way to Understand Long-COVID19 Fatigue

Frontiers in Psychiatry

Larraitz Aranburu¹  Iñigo Murga²  Pascual A. Gargiulo³  José-Vicente Lafuente⁴  Juan Carlos Gómez Esteban⁴ 

[1] Department of Mathematics, University of the Basque Country (UPV-EHU), Leioa, Spain;LaNCE-Neuropharm Group, Department of Neuroscience, University of the Basque Country (UPV-EHU), Leioa, Spain;Lab Experimental Psychology, Consejo Nacional de Investigaciones Científicas y Técnicas (CONICET), Department of Pathology, Universidad Nacional de Cuyo (UNC), Mendoza, Argentina;Neurodegenerative Disease Group, Biocruces Research Institute, Barakaldo, Spain;

关键词: Myalgic Encephalomyelitis;    Chronic Fatigue Syndrome;    post-viral fatigue;    long COVID-19;    dysautonomia;   

DOI  :  10.3389/fpsyt.2021.735784

来源: DOAJ

【 摘 要 】

The aim of present paper is to identify clinical phenotypes in a cohort of patients affected of Myalgic Encephalomyelitis/Chronic Fatigue Syndrome. Ninety-one patients and 22 healthy controls were studied with the following questionnaires, in addition to medical history: visual analogical scale for fatigue and pain, DePaul questionnaire (post-exertional malaise, immune, neuroendocrine), Pittsburgh sleep quality index, COMPASS-31 (dysautonomia), Montreal cognitive assessment, Toulouse-Piéron test (attention), Hospital Anxiety and Depression test and Karnofsky scale. Co-morbidities and drugs-intake were also recorded. A hierarchical clustering with clinical results was performed. Final study group was made up of 84 patients, mean age 44.41 ± 9.37 years (66 female/18 male) and 22 controls, mean age 45 ± 13.15 years (14 female/8 male). Patients meet diagnostic criteria of Fukuda-1994 and Carruthers-2011. Clustering analysis identify five phenotypes. Two groups without fibromyalgia were differentiated by various levels of anxiety and depression (13 and 20 patients). The other three groups present fibromyalgia plus a patient without it, but with high scores in pain scale, they were segregated by prevalence of dysautonomia (17), neuroendocrine (15), and immunological affectation (19). Regarding gender, women showed higher scores than men in cognition, pain level and depressive syndrome. Mathematical tools are a suitable approach to objectify some elusive features in order to understand the syndrome. Clustering unveils phenotypes combining fibromyalgia with varying degrees of dysautonomia, neuroendocrine or immune features and absence of fibromyalgia with high or low levels of anxiety-depression. There is no a specific phenotype for women or men.

【 授权许可】

Unknown