Chronic fatigue syndrome definition

Fukuda K, Straus SE, Hickie I, Sharpe MC, Dobbins JG, Komaroff A. The chronic fatigue syndrome a comprehensive approach to its definition and study. International Chronic Fatigue Syndrome Study Group. Ann Intern Med 1994 121 953-959. 

Table 18-1 lists the various names given to MCS. The most recent name for MCS is idiopathic environmental intolerances, or IEI (Bornschein et al. 2001). The variety of names reflects the unresolved definition of MCS. A survey of physicians familiar with MCS proposed six characteristics of MCS, as listed in Table 18-2 (Bartha et al. 1999). Table 18-3 lists the most frequent symptoms. MCS symptoms often overlap with symptoms of chronic fatigue syndrome and fibromyalgia (Jason et al. 2000 Nawab et al. 2000). Prevalence of MCS in community surveys and occupational health clinics was found to be 6.3% and 23.0%, respectively (Kreutzer et al. 1999 Kutsogiannis and Davidoff 2001). 

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