Global prevalence of chronic fatigue syndrome among long COVID-19 patients: A systematic review and meta-analysis 2022 Salari et al

Abstract
Background

Chronic fatigue syndrome is a persistent and debilitating disorder. According to several studies, chronic fatigue syndrome has been identified among recovered COVID-19 patients as the most common symptom of long COVID. The aim of this systematic review and meta-analysis study was to obtain the prevalence of chronic fatigue syndrome in long COVID cases.

Methods
In this systematic review and meta-analysis, we analysed reported results of studies that assessed the occurrence of chronic fatigue syndrome among COVID-19 patients four weeks after the onset of symptoms. The study selection was commenced by searching PubMed, Web of Science, Science Direct, Scopus, Embase, and Google scholar using the keywords of Chronic fatigue syndrome, COVID-19, and post-COVID-19 syndrome. The searches were without a lower time limit and until April 2022. Heterogeneity of studies was assessed using the I2 index, and a random effects model was used for analysis. Data analysis was performed within the Comprehensive Meta-Analysis software (version 2).

Results
The pooled prevalence of chronic fatigue syndrome four weeks after the onset of COVID-19 symptoms, in 52 studies with a sample size of 127,117, was 45.2% (95% CI: 34.1-56.9%). Meta-regression analysis in examining the effects of the two factors of sample size, and year of study on the changes in the overall prevalence, showed that with increasing sample size, and year of study, the prevalence of chronic fatigue syndrome among long COVID patients (p < 0.05).

Conclusion
Our results show that the overall prevalence of chronic fatigue syndrome as a long COVID symptom is 45.2%. Chronic fatigue after infection with COVID-19 can negatively affect personal and social lives. Given such significant negative consequences caused by the syndrome, it is recommended that health policymakers allocate funds to reduce the adverse effects of this syndrome, by creating programs to support long COVID patients.

https://link.springer.com/article/10.1186/s13030-022-00250-5

 

References are to studies that include the word "fatigue" - I got as far as five of them before giving up - some of the studies have Chronic fatigue syndrome in their reference list and/or discussion, others no mention at all. The 45% prevalence claim, even just for chronic fatigue seems meaningless.

 

Those programs are called research. Anything else is worthless since it's beyond clear that medicine requires the product of scientific research before they can do anything that isn't complete garbage, the entire algorithm of healthcare requires this knowledge to exist and simply falls apart without it.

This is absurd and unfortunate but this is the system we have and there is nothing useful out of pretending we have the system we want, a system that can handle this problem without being spoon-fed the full answer in order to get started on figuring it out.

Everything else is either purely symbolic, or remains symbolic as long as the chokehold of shifting goalposts is maintained. This chokehold being maintained by the very people who are supposed to work on this is basically a problem of interlocking gears, there is no fix for interlocking gears, they have to be set the right way or it doesn't work.

There is no fix for this problem, it's a design problem, all design problems flow downstream and cannot be fixed by downstream fixes:

 

"Chronic Fatigue Syndrome" is not just fatigue.

Chronic fatigue is chronic fatigue, without the syndrome bit.

When will researchers, and pretty much everyone else understand this?!

(I think I know the answer to this...)