Can CFS be diagnosed by laboratory tests?
No diagnostic test exists for CFS. Currently, laboratory tests are useful solely to rule out other causes of fatigue. The same is true of serologic tests for certain viruses. Numerous scientific reports have documented immunologic differences between groups of CFS patients and healthy controls, but differences are not observed consistently, and test results between individual patients and controls overlap considerably. In other words, the test values for a randomly chosen CFS patient and those for a randomly chosen healthy person may both fall into the normal range for any of these tests. How is CFS diagnosed? CFS is currently diagnosed by a history of illness suggestive of CFS, and through the systematic exclusion of other possible causes. A patient must first have profound fatigue for a minimum of 6 months. To complete the diagnosis, a physician must rule out the many clinically defined (and often treatable) causes of chronic fatigue by using a panel of routine diagnostic tests. Cons
