The maintained attention assessment in patients affected by Myalgic encephalomyelitis/chronic fatigue syndrome: a reliable biomarker?

Abstract

The maintained attention is the cause of great functional limitations in CFS/ME, a disease that mainly affects women in the central period of life. Cognitive function is explored using the Montreal Cognitive Assessment, the maintained attention using the Toulouse-Piéron test with which the Global Index of Attention and Perception (GIAP) is obtained, the fatigue using the visual analog scale and the perception of effort using the modified Borg scale. The final sample were 84 patients (66 women/18 men) who met diagnostic criteria (Fukuda-1994, Carruthers-2011) and 22 healthy controls (14 women/8 men). Most of patients maintain normal cognitive function, showing low or very low attention score in the 70% of patients with a marked cognitive fatigue compared to the control group (p < 0.05). There were no significant differences between genders in GIAP or fatigue for CFS/ME; however, sick women perceive cognitive effort higher than men. Deficits in sustained attention and the perception of fatigue, so effort after performing the proposed test are a sensitive and reliable indicator that allows us to substantiate a clinical suspicion and refer patients for further studies in order to confirm or rule out CFS/ME.

The Conners Continuous Performance Test CPT3™: Is it a reliable marker to predict neurocognitive dysfunction in Myalgic encephalomyelitis/chronic fatigue syndrome?

“…Our results are in agreement with other neurocognitive research in ME/CFS reflecting attentional impairments on cognitive performance in these patients (Murga et al, 2021). Following these current findings, it would be quite interesting to monitor these brain areas with advanced techniques, such as fMRI, PET-scan, etc., to establish the key neurological bases that could be involved in CFS.…”

“…Their results support the reliability of maintained attention as a biomarker of ME/CFS, and attention deficit is a significant disability in patients affected by central fatigue. This neurocognitive dysfunction points to the neural networks involved in attention and focuses the pathological substrate in areas like the anterior cingulate cortex, lateral ventral prefrontal cortex, basal ganglia, or locus coeruleus (Murga et al, 2021).…”

Brain fog of post-COVID-19 condition and Chronic Fatigue Syndrome, same medical disorder?

“…Both conditions presented slow processing speed, deficient sustained attention and verbal memory impairment [ 29 ]. Statistically significant differences were found in attention and visual perception, with the ME/CFS group presenting the largest impairment.…”