Incidence and Prevalence of Post-COVID-19 Myalgic Encephalomyelitis: A Report from the Observational RECOVER-Adult Study, 2024, Vernon +

Dolphin said:
According to the results, 4.5% post-COVID-19 participants met ME/CFS diagnostic criteria, compared to 0.6% participants that had not been infected by SARS-CoV-2 virus
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and this puts an enormous question mark over the study.

The highest credible prevalence rates we have for ME/CFS, from the recent Samms/Ponting study, is 0.6%. Seems hard to believe they found the same rate of NEW cases a year in the non-Covid control group Something doesn’t add up. You would expect incidence to be so much lower than prevalence.
 
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This seems to be getting a significant amount of traction in the media. I get Google Alerts for news that mentions "ME/CFS" and there have been a surprisingly high number of results for this the past few days. 23 articles in 5 days.

And this morning I heard it used as a question in a trivia game podcast on NPR. (47:20 in the January 18 episode)

"According to a new report, one in twenty people who caught *blank* suffer long term effects."
 
Dakota15 said:
Commentary from Koroshetz on RECOVER ME/CFS publication with Healio:

https://www.healio.com/news/infecti...v2-infection-with-increase-in-chronic-fatigue
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“Given the estimate of 20 million in the U.S. with long COVID, this translates into hundreds of thousands of persons in the U.S. developing ME/CFS due to the pandemic,” Koroshetz said. “Both research and health care should focus on ME/CFS as the numbers of new long COVID cases start to shrink.”

Do we know new cases of Long Covid are decreasing?
 
forestglip said:
This seems to be getting a significant amount of traction in the media. I get Google Alerts for news that mentions "ME/CFS" and there have been a surprisingly high number of results for this the past few days. 23 articles in 5 days.

And this morning I heard it used as a question in a trivia game podcast on NPR. (47:20 in the January 18 episode)

"According to a new report, one in twenty people who caught *blank* suffer long term effects."
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This study has reached us too, I have seen articles about it in two well-known news outlets here. This was also one of those extremely rare (or non-existent, rather) instances, when someone other than me used the word ME/CFS in an article, instead of just chronic fatigue syndrome.

So I would hazard a guess that it is picked up by the media in various different countries, even if we are talking about just a few articles here and there.
 
A Reddit post —

I just came back from my neurologist. I asked him about the study published last week which found a 4.5% prevalence of ME/CFS in people who had Covid.

He said before the pandemic, his whole team of 3 people, who deal with the ME/CFS cases here, treated 10 patients PER YEAR. Now, after Covid19, he alone sees 5 patients PER WEEK to determine and/or treat patients for ME/CFS. And that is just in my small town university hospital.
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(Zurich)
 
What exactly do they mean by PASC Algorithm? Recover has published different studies with different scoring systems. I assume they are referencing their own symptom score published in
Development of a Definition of Postacute Sequelae of SARS-CoV-2 Infection, 2023, Thaweethai et al?
That symptom score was based on a cohort were more people reported PEM in the uninfected than in the infected group and where the rate of PEM was extraordinarily high. Possibly not very suitable to characterise a relationship with ME/CFS...
 
Simon M said:
and this puts an enormous question mark over the study.

The highest credible prevalence rates we have for ME/CFS, from the recent Samms/Ponting study, is 0.6%. Seems hard to believe they found the same rate of NEW cases a year in the non-Covid control group Something doesn’t add up. You would expect incidence to be so much lower than prevalence.
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Having a look at their earlier study this would appear to be the same problem @Trish already commented on back then

Trish said:
The prevalence of PEM seem odd.
28% in the infected group vs 7% in the uninfected group.

I'm not sure what they were assessing as PEM, but a finding of 7% in the uninfected group seems remarkably high, given the pre pandemic prevalence of ME/CFS of well under 1%, and as far as I know there isn't a list of other diseases that would account for 6% prevalence of PEM, since we don't know of anything else that causes PEM.

Edit from eFigure2 in Supplement 3: For new onset PEM the frequencies were 28% and 4%.
I understand the uninfected group were volunteers, not a properly representative sample as required for epidemiology studies.
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Rate of 4.5% Post-COVID ME/CFS Onset Cited in Recent RECOVER Study is Based on Biased Cohort

Arther A. Mirin

[Letter to the editor. This is the whole letter.]

The recent paper by Vernon, et al.1 predicts that 4.5% of adult COVID sufferers in the United States experience subsequent onset of Myalgic Encephalomyelitis / Chronic Fatigue Syndrome (ME/CFS). While the degree of ME/CFS onset is indeed significant, the figure of 4.5% cannot be justified from the provided data.

Vernon, et al. compute a male onset rate of 3.41% (107/3134, see Table 1 of paper) and a female onset rate of 4.91% (422/8600). They then take a weighted average based on the gender breakdown of their cohort, which is 27.7% male and 72.3% female, to arrive at 4.5% overall.

The problem here is that their cohort, which is nearly three-quarters female, is not representative of the adult gender prevalence of COVID in the United States. One can estimate the gender breakdown using the CDC Household Pulse Survey,2 which shows 61.6% of US adults having gotten COVID, 58.6% of males and 64.4% of females. These numbers are consistent with an assumed gender breakdown of the adult population of 48.3% male and 51.7% female, from which can be deduced an adult COVID breakdown of 46% male and 54% female, leading to an ME/CFS onset rate of 4.22%. While significant, this is less than the 4.5% published conclusion.

Web | PDF | Journal of General Internal Medicine | Open Access
 
forestglip said:
One can estimate the gender breakdown using the CDC Household Pulse Survey,2
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Have I understood the table correctly? It seems like the percentage of people that report ever having had a covid infection decreases with time.

And I very much doubt that only 61.6 % of US adults have ever had covid.

Long COVID - Household Pulse Survey - COVID-19

As part of an ongoing partnership with the Census Bureau, the National Center for Health Statistics (NCHS) recently added questions to assess the prevalence of post-COVID-19 conditions (long COVID), on the experimental Household Pulse Survey. This 20-minute online survey was designed to...
www.cdc.gov www.cdc.gov
 
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