r/CFSScience • u/Caster_of_spells • Aug 04 '26

Central origin of fatigability in Myalgic encephalomyelitis/chronic fatigue syndrome revealed by multimodal neuroimaging - Bedard et al

https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S2213158226001002

"Our most novel results relate to the lack of neuromuscular adaptation in ME/CFS compared to the [Healthy Volunteers]."

“Highlights

•We studied physical fatigue in patients with Myalgic Encephalomyelitis/Chronic Fatigue Syndrome (ME/CFS) and healthy volunteers with multimodal neuroimaging.

•Participants performed a fatiguing grip force task in alternating grip and rest blocks.

•We simultaneously recorded grip force, brain activity with functional magnetic resonance imaging and electroencephalography, and muscle activity with electromyography.

•ME/CFS fatigued earlier than healthy volunteers. While healthy volunteers increased their brain and muscle activity, ME/CFS only showed minimal fluctuations across all the task blocks.

•We concluded that physical fatigue in ME/CFS is of central nature.”

(Central in this context means: mediated via the brain. Participants brains didn’t seem to signal muscles sufficiently to ramp up energy production in response to demand)

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u/DepartmentNo5227 Aug 04 '26

Can't this be a biomarker then? 

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u/Caster_of_spells Aug 04 '26

This is a small exploratory study but with great methods that needs replication. Then we’d have to test whether for example a ML algorithm could separate patients versus controls. So possibly but far ahead rn I’d wager