COVID-19 appears to increase a person’s risk of developing chronic fatigue syndrome.

People who’ve caught COVID are nearly five times more likely to develop chronic fatigue syndrome, according to results recently published in the Journal of General Internal Medicine.

This could explain why new cases of myalgic encephalomyelitis/chronic fatigue syndrome (ME/CFS) are 15 times higher now than they were prior to the pandemic, researchers said.

“Our results provide evidence that the rate and risk of developing ME/CFS following SARS-CoV-2 infection is significantly increased,” a team led by Suzanne Vernon, research director of the Bateman Home Center in Salt Lake City, concluded.

People with ME/CFS suffer from constant fatigue, and become even more tired after exerting themselves in activities as common as running errands, attending school events, getting work done or even showering, the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) says.

They also might suffer from sleep problems, dizziness and difficulty with memory or thinking.

Many of these symptoms also are found in people suffering from long COVID, leading researchers to suspect a possible link.

It’s also known that ME/CFS can be triggered by other infections like Epstein/Barr virus, researchers noted.

For this study, researchers drew upon data gathered as part of a study on the long-term health effects of COVID.

Researchers tracked nearly 12,000 people who’d been infected with COVID and compared their health to more than 1,400 people who hadn’t come down with the coronavirus.

Results show that about 4.5% of people who’ve been infected with COVID develop chronic fatigue syndrome, compared with 0.6% who haven’t been infected.

Post-exertional malaise, dizziness when standing and cognitive impairment were the most common ME/CFS symptoms reported by COVID patients.

More study is needed to understand why some COVID patients are more likely to develop ME/CFS following infection than others, researchers concluded.