Fig. 2.

Patient-reported outcomes of treatments in ME/CFS and long COVID. (A) The leading treatments and categories that contributed to improving patients’ overall conditions as reported in self-assessments. The data within parentheses next to each treatment indicate the number of responses provided on the treatment, the false discovery rate adjusted P-value compared to the reference treatment, and the Net Assessment Score (NAS). The stacked bar plots show the percentages of patient responses related to the perceived treatment effect of each treatment, spanning from “much worse” to “much better”. Orange shading denotes the percentage of patients who reported a positive treatment effect—with darker orange indicating a stronger positive effect—whereas blue shading indicates adverse side effects, with darker blue representing more significant negative effects. Vitamin C (oral, nonliposomal) was used as the reference treatment. Of all the treatments investigated, Graded exercise therapy (GET) received the lowest NAS. (B) Impact of treatments on patient symptoms as reported in self-assessments. For each of the core symptoms, shown in a gradient scale is the proportion of respondents of a treatment who also reported the impact of the treatment improving the specific symptom.