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Stephen E. Straus, MD

Arch Intern Med. 1992;152(8):1569-1570.

	Since this article does not have an abstract, we have provided the first 150 words of the full text PDF and any section headings.

The term chronic fatigue syndrome emerged in the course of a workshop¹ convened in 1987 by the US Centers for Disease Control (CDC), Atlanta, Ga. The goal of the meeting was to forge a workable case definition of an illness that, just 2 years earlier, had been called chronic Epstein-Barr virusinfection, but for which there was already mounting evidence against an etiologic role for that agent. The case definition that arose represented a consensus opinion rather than rigorously derived criteria. We participants in the meeting had a fairly clear sense of the illness; we just could not delineate it with precision.

Three problems were immediately apparent with the case definition. First, the lack of pathognomonic physical and laboratory findings essentially leaves the definition to rest on a series of unconfirmable symptoms. Second, some of the specifics of the definition are vague and subject to variable interpretation and application, . . . [Full Text PDF of this Article]

Author Affiliations
Laboratory of Clinical Investigation Bldg 10, Room 11N228 National Institutes of Health 9000 Rockville Pike Bethesda, MD 20892

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