IMEA Statement: Response to Simon Wessely and the BMJ article

IMEA Statement: Response to Simon Wessely and the BMJ article:

Chronic fatigue syndrome appears to be a heterogenous condition and is often described as a disease with many subsets. This is in reality an artefact caused by giving people, whose symptoms have different causes, the same generic label. In medicine this situation is normally resolved by the use of a differential diagnosis.


There is a "subset" of patients who, when investigated in trials, display a range of neuroimmune abnormalities, which are very similar to those displayed by people with Multiple Sclerosis and Alzheimer's disease. We will, for the sake of clarification, call these patients CFS 2.


When other "subsets" are investigated they display no abnormalities other than those that would be expected if the patients had symptoms as a result of deep psychological disturbance. We will call this group ... Read more>>