No Causal Effects Detected in COVID-19 and Myalgic Encephalomyelitis/Chronic Fatigue Syndrome: A Two Sample Mendelian Randomization Study

Wangzi Xu, Yu Cao and Lin Wu ()
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Wangzi Xu: School of Public Health, Xiamen University, Xiamen 361000, China
Yu Cao: School of Public Health, Xiamen University, Xiamen 361000, China
Lin Wu: Department of Clinical Laboratory, Xiang’an Hospital of Xiamen University, School of Medicine, Xiamen University, Xiamen 361000, China

IJERPH, 2023, vol. 20, issue 3, 1-13

Abstract: New clinical observational studies suggest that Myalgic Encephalomyelitis/Chronic Fatigue Syndrome (ME/CFS) is a sequela of COVID-19 infection, but whether there is an exact causal relationship between COVID-19 and ME/CFS remains to be verified. To investigate whether infection with COVID-19 actually causes ME/CFS, this paper obtained pooled data from the Genome Wide Association Study (GWAS) and analyzed the relationship between COVID susceptibility, hospitalization and severity of COVID and ME/CFS, respectively, using two-sample Mendelian randomization (TSMR). TSMR analysis was performed by inverse variance weighting (IVW), weighted median method, MR-Egger regression and weighted mode and simple mode methods, respectively, and then the causal relationship between COVID-19 and ME/CFS was further evaluated by odds ratio (OR). Eventually, we found that COVID-19 severity, hospitalization and susceptibility were all not significantly correlated with ME/CFS (OR:1.000,1.000,1.000; 95% CI:0.999–1.000, 0.999–1.001, 0.998–1.002; p = 0.333, 0.862, 0.998, respectively). We found the results to be reliable after sensitivity analysis. These results suggested that SARS-CoV-2 infection may not significantly contribute to the elevated risk of developing CFS, and therefore ME/CFS may not be a sequela of COVID-19, but may simply present with symptoms similar to those of CFS after COVID-19 infection, and thus should be judged and differentiated by physicians when diagnosing and treating the disease in clinical practice.

Keywords: causal relationship; Mendelian Randomization (MR); epidemiology; Myalgic Encephalomyelitis/Chronic Fatigue Syndrome (ME/CFS); COVID-19 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: I I1 I3 Q Q5 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2023
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