Comorbid Conditions

Comorbid conditions, or comorbidities, are medical diagnoses a patient has at the same time as their primary diagnosis. Comorbidities can be problematic when trying to treat the primary disease because they add more considerations for clinical management.

Comorbid conditions, like fibromyalgia, irritable bowel syndrome, and mast cell activation syndrome, are extremely common in people with ME/CFS. For ME/CFS, though, comorbidities not only complicate clinical management but also diagnosis, due to overlapping symptoms and a lack of diagnostic test for ME/CFS. In addition, the prevalence of comorbid conditions makes the population with ME/CFS very heterogeneous, or diverse, and therefore complicated to study and treat.

To help distinguish ME/CFS from comorbid conditions, the Melbourne ME/CFS Collaboration performed a study on thousands of patients with ME/CFS, comorbidities, and non-diseased controls in the UK Biobank. In this project, they developed an algorithm that can identify ME/CFS from a panel of metabolic markers and survey data with good specificity. To read more about this study, click here.