(NewsNation) — The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention has released the first nationally representative estimate of how many U.S. adults have chronic fatigue syndrome: 3.3 million.
Chronic fatigue is characterized by at least six months of severe exhaustion not helped by bed rest. Patients also report pain, brain fog and other symptoms that can get worse after exercise, work or other activity. There is no cure, and no blood test or scan to enable a quick diagnosis.
The condition “is not a rare illness,” said the CDC’s Dr. Elizabeth Unger, one of the report’s co-authors.
Participants were asked if a doctor or other healthcare professional had ever told them they had myalgic encephalomyelitis or chronic fatigue syndrome, and whether they still have it. The report, which survived 57,000 U.S. adults in 2021 and 2022, revealed about 1.3% said yes to both questions.
Among the other findings: The syndrome was more common in women than men, and in white people compared with some other racial and ethnic groups. Those findings are consistent with earlier, smaller studies.
However, the findings also contradicted long-held perceptions that chronic fatigue syndrome is a rich white woman’s disease.
There was less of a gap between women and men than some previous studies suggested, and there was hardly any difference between white and Black people. The study also found that a higher percentage of poor people said they had it than affluent people.
The report relied on patients’ memories, without verifying their diagnoses through medical records.
Doctors have not been able to pin down a cause, although research suggests it is a body’s prolonged overreaction to an infection or other jolt to the immune system.
Dr. Tom Pitts said he’d start by conducting a sleep study for patients who are experiencing fatigue instead of immediately diagnosing them with chronic fatigue syndrome.
“I always want to make sure their sleep is not interrupted by inflammation, movements, problems that are not getting into REM sleep; that’s the number one cause of daytime fatigue,” Pitts said on NewsNation’s “Morning In America.” “Then, I would run a complete set of labs, scan relevant things history, and physical are vital.”
Chronic fatigue syndrome rose to prominence nearly 40 years ago, when clusters of cases were reported in Incline Village, Nevada, and Lyndonville, New York. Some doctors dismissed it as psychosomatic and called it “yuppie flu.”
The tally likely includes some patients with long COVID who were suffering from prolonged exhaustion, CDC officials said.
Long COVID is broadly defined as chronic health problems weeks, months or years after an acute COVID-19 infection. Symptoms vary, but a subset of patients have the same problems seen in people with chronic fatigue syndrome.
Pitts suggests health care providers treat chronic fatigue and long COVID should be created with immunotherapy.
“If you would treat this like Guillain-Barré, we would have such a better outcome. he said.