Relationships of Cognitive Difficulties to Immune Measures, Depression and Illness Burden in Chronic Fatigue Syndrome

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Abstract
Objective. We related the subjective assessment of cognitive difficulties with lymphocyte phenotypes, cellmediated immunity (CMI), cytokine and neopterin levels in patients with chronic fatigue syndrome (CFS), in order to determine if CFS patients complaining of greater cognitive difficulties would show greater impairments in cell-mediated immunity and a greater degree of immune system dysregulation, and to determine if these cognitive difficulties would correlate with the other non-affective measures of CFS associated illness burden. We also assessed whether these relationships would hold independent of depression in two ways, by statistically covarying depression severity scores and by comparing subsets of CFS patients with and without a concurrent diagnosis of major depressive disorder. Design. A case series of CFS patients. Setting. Outpatient tertiary referral clinic at the University of Miami School of Medicine, Miami, FL. Patienrs. Consecutive sample of 65 patients who were referred as CFS to the U...