## Saturday, February 12, 2011

### 38% of those with a diagnosis of depression are misclassified as having CFS

Leonard A. Jason, Meredyth Evans, Molly Brown, Nicole Porter, Abigail Brown, Jessica Hunnell, Valerie Anderson, Athena Lerch
DePaul University:

Jason, Najar, Porter, and Reh (2009) found that 38% of those with a diagnosis of MDD were misclassified as having CFS using the CDC empiric CFS case definition (Reeves et al.).

With the Reeves et al. empiric case definition criteria, the estimated rates of CFS in the US have increased to 2.54% (Reeves et al., 2007), rates that are about ten times higher than prior CDC prevalence estimates (Reyes et al., 2003) and estimates of other investigators (Jason, Richman, et al., 1999).

It is plausible that this inflated CFS prevalence estimate in the U.S. is due to an inappropriate broadening of the case definition, and this might very well be related to specificity problems in the measures and cutoffs selected for this case definition. Read more>>

MDD: major depressive disorder