Deficits of Interference Control in Adolescents With Chronic Fatigue Syndrome

摘要

Cognitive problems are key symptoms of chronic fatigue syndrome (CFS). Adults with CFS encounter difficulties completing complex information-processing tasks with considerable interference. Performance on neuropsychological tasks have not been studied in adolescents with CFS. Considering our knowledge of adults with CFS, focusing on tasks with a high level of interference is most promising in differentiating adolescents with CFS from healthy adolescents.Interference control is the ability to protect a response from interruption by competing responses or events. One interference control paradigm is the EriksenFlanker Task (EFT), in which a competing response to irrelevant information has to be inhibited. Weinvestigated whether adolescents with CFS show less interference control than healthy adolescents. We also explored the importance of confounding factors, such as depression and anxiety.