The Relationship between Age and Illness Duration in Chronic Fatigue Syndrome

Abstract

Chronic fatigue syndrome (CFS) is a debilitating illness, but it is unclear if patient age and illness duration might affect symptoms and functioning of patients. In the current study, participants were categorized into four groups based upon age (under or over age 55) and illness duration (more or less than 10 years). The groups were compared on functioning and symptoms. Findings indicated that those who were older with a longer illness duration had significantly higher levels of mental health functioning than those who were younger with a shorter or longer illness duration and the older group with a shorter illness duration. The results suggest that older patients with an illness duration of over 10 years have significantly higher levels of mental health functioning than the three other groups. For symptoms, the younger/longer illness duration group had significantly worse immune and autonomic domains than the older/longer illness group. In addition, the younger patients with a longer illness duration displayed greater autonomic and immune symptoms in comparison to the older group with a longer illness duration. These findings suggest that both age and illness duration need to be considered when trying to understand the influence of these factors on patients.

Unemployment and work disability in individuals with chronic fatigue syndrome/myalgic encephalomyelitis: a community-based cross-sectional study from Spain

“…Nacul et al suggested that the physical role item might be an adequate measure of outcome in CFS/ME, since it was the most affected [33]. Patients in our series had a poorer QoL (as measured by the SF-36 questionnaire) than CFS/ME patients from similar backgrounds reported in three previous studies [33, 35–37]. As a difference, scores on the items in Nacul et al’s study [33] showed less variability than those of the other comparative studies, including ours.…”

Onset Patterns and Course of Myalgic Encephalomyelitis/Chronic Fatigue Syndrome

“…In a cross-sectional survey of ~500 subjects, Chu et al (141) found low, non-significant Pearson correlation coefficients of 0.025 and 0.019 when SF-36 PF scores were plotted against age and duration of illness. In fact, Komaroff (142) found slight improvements in SF-36 PF when following one cohort of 99 subjects over a decade and both Tiersky (20) and Kidd (125) mentioned that long-suffering subjects might develop better psychological coping techniques. One study (143) did indicate increased fatigue, autonomic symptoms and depression in older subjects relative to younger ones but it is unclear how this study's conclusion might apply to the question at hand since they emanate from a sample who did not develop ME/CFS until they were 55 years of age or older, 15–20 years beyond the mean age of ME/CFS onset.…”

Elevated blood lactate in resting conditions correlate with post-exertional malaise severity in patients with Myalgic encephalomyelitis/Chronic fatigue syndrome

“…Giving to the fact that ME/CFS is a heterogeneous illness, many studies tried to subtype ME/SFC patients according to various clinical variables such as number of symptoms 6 , type of fatigue 7 , mode of illness onset 8 , age at onset 9 , and illness course. Biological variables were also used to group ME/CFS patients including natural killer cell activity 10 , cytokines 11 , and gene expression in the peripheral blood 12 .…”