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

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
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."
 
Commentary from Koroshetz on RECOVER ME/CFS publication with Healio:

https://www.healio.com/news/infecti...v2-infection-with-increase-in-chronic-fatigue
“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?
 
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."
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.

(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...
 
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.

Having a look at their earlier study this would appear to be the same problem @Trish already commented on back then

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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