[TurkishPoptart]

Long Covid is really not new. It is virtually indistinguishable from the condition long known in the medical lexicon as post-infectious syndrome or myalgic encephalomyelitis/chronic fatigue syndrome (ME/CFS). Although some have recognized and studied their similarities, it seems no one has made the simplifying observation that they are essentially the same condition.[1]

[1]: https://www.statnews.com/2023/09/14/long-covid-me-cfs-myalgi...

[PaulKeeble]

Symptom wise and quite a lot of the biology they definitely appear similar. The problem is the genetics studies show some overlap, about 80 combined SNPs for ME/CFS out of 270 and out of around 150 for Long Covid.

There is more to it than just different genetic mappings because while both conditions share mitochondria differences which compartments are different. Depending on how deep you dig into the biology they appear the same or quite different and a number of multiple point blood, urine and saliva tests can distinguish the diseases from each other.

I think at this point its more accurate to say they are overlapping conditions, they have similarities but they are different conditions. Sister diseases much in the same way there is overlap in Fibromylgia and Gulf War syndrome with ME/CFS and each other. Long Covid is another post infection Neurological and immune disease with unknown biomarker/core pathology. There are clearly a lot of measurable changes that are dysfunctional so its every bit as real biological disease as the others. What they definitely share is a high amount of debilitation, severe disability and patient reduction in quality of life on the same set of 280 symptoms in a very similar patter of prevalence.

Its also now a disease with very little research funding world wide as well so the situation is unlikely to improve for the 400m+ sufferers world wide.

[aswegs8]

Is that from GWAS/MR Studies?

[PaulKeeble]

There has been a couple of GWAS and also a few SNP combination studies that I have seen, could have been a few more I missed. Nothing full genome yet so that might increase or decrease the overlap.

[MLgulabio]

I really don't understand this comment? Its quite commonly known that this is the same/related?

Your 'source' is btw. from 2023 and as far as i understand it, the main issue is, that due to covid, a lot more people got it but because it was already ignored or played down before, it still is and the people in need just don't get help.

Covid apparently triggered it in more people than before.

I also have the feeling that someone else posted this missconception a few weeks ago on hn. Or was that you too?

[tick_tock_tick]

Because COVID got political if you drop COVID from the name your ability to get funding and attention to study it falls off a cliff.

[nottorp]

Oh i get it. So "AI" got political? Because I don't think you can get funding for anything else in IT right now.

[amelius]

Is this a scientific fact or a hypothesis?

[tbrownaw]

Not sure about the ME/CFS thing, but "post-infectious syndrome" is literally what its name says it is which makes it a larger category that "long covid" would taxonomize under.

[smj-edison]

https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/40627388/#&gid=article-figur... (figure one)

[wizzwizz4]

In the limit, there's no difference between a scientific fact and an unfalsified hypothesis. I'm not aware of anyone falsifying this one, and it's over five years old, so I'm going to say "scientific fact".

At this point, even if it is falsified, that falsification will probably take the form "here is an exception to the general rule", like how we still use Newton's law of gravitation even though it was falsified by Urbain Le Verrier's 1859 observations of Mercury.

[amelius]

If a hypothesis has not been falsified that does not mean there is consensus around it in the scientific community.

Your statement can also be applied to the inverse of the hypothesis, after all.

[wizzwizz4]

I'll put it another way: long COVID has been studied quite a lot over the past 5 years, and I'm not aware of anyone being able to distinguish it from ME/CFS (except by definition). People appear to have stopped trying to draw a distinction, by and large, in favour of trying to identify better category boundaries to use instead. See https://doi.org/10.3390/biomedicines13112797 for a Nov 2025 literature review, which basically says "except for long COVID being caused by SARS-CoV-2, it's very difficult to tell ME/CFS-like long COVID and ME/CFS apart" in excruciating detail. Some things have been found to occur in long COVID but not found to occur in ME/CFS, and vice versa, but afaik there's nothing found to occur in ME/CFS-like long COVID that's been found to not occur in ME/CFS.

(Technically, long COVID is a broader diagnosis, encompassing some long-term conditions caused by a COVID-19 infection that are distinct from ME/CFS, but I consider that a "by definition" distinction rather than anything real. This is what you'd expect if ME/CFS had multiple causes, and COVID-19 infection could cause multiple chronic conditions, and most long COVID is actually ME/CFS.)

The ME Association came to this conclusion a couple of years ago: https://meassociation.org.uk/2023/05/updated-booklet-long-co...

> The ME Association (MEA) takes the view that Long Covid and ME/CFS are both examples of a serious and debilitating condition that can follow any type of viral infection.