Summary
- On February 18, 2025, Dr. Wüst and colleagues published a response to a letter criticising their research on muscle abnormalities in Long COVID.
- The original study, titled “Muscle abnormalities worsen after post-exertional malaise in long COVID”, was published on January 4, 2024.
- Dr. Wüst's team clarified that their study did not address exercise treatment but found that skeletal muscle abnormalities in Long COVID is not explained by deconditioning or bed rest.
- They emphasised the importance of avoiding activities that trigger PEM and cautioned against generalizing their findings to all Long COVID patients.
On the 18th February 2025, Dr Wüst and colleagues published a reply to a letter misinterpreting the findings of their research study, ‘Muscle abnormalities worsen after post-exertional malaise in long COVID', first published 4th January 2024. The ME Association firmly supports Dr Wüst and colleagues in their rebuttal.
In their letter, published in Nature Communications, Appelman et al disagrees with the conclusions drawn by Saris et al. and their extrapolation of results to the context of deconditioning and exercise as treatment, as stated within the response in the first paragraph:
We thank Saris et al. for their interest in our recent paper, which focused on the skeletal muscle components of post-exertional malaise (PEM) in Long COVID patients. We did not address the efficacy of exercise as a treatment, but our findings do not support that deconditioning or bed rest explains the skeletal muscle abnormalities in Long COVID. PEM is a distinct symptom that is poorly understood and not analogous to other conditions. We caution against generalizing our results to all Long COVID patients or drawing causal conclusions beyond the study’s design, and we advocate adherence to established guidelines that recommend avoiding activities triggering PEM.
Appelman et al