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New Delhi: A new study has uncovered a shared biological process that may help explain chronic exhaustion across five conditions—post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD), long Covid, rheumatoid arthritis, chronic fatigue syndrome and multiple sclerosis.
The findings, published in the Journal of Translational Medicine, reveal “striking” biological similarities between illnesses usually viewed as separate disorders and triggered by different events ranging from viral infections to psychological trauma or autoimmune responses, researchers said.
The researchers, led by those at the University of East Anglia and Oxford BioDynamics Plc in the United Kingdom, found that genes linked to each illness were feeding into the same major biological systems, including immune and inflammatory signalling, mitochondrial energy production, metabolic regulation, stress-response mechanisms and neuroendocrine signalling.
The study could help explain why people who have experienced a viral infection or psychological trauma can go on to develop similar symptoms, they said.
“We now think the answer may lie in shared regulatory networks embedded within the body’s immune and metabolic systems,” lead researcher Dmitry Pshezhetskiy, professor at the University of East Anglia’s Norwich Medical School, said.
“A COVID-19 infection may trigger prolonged immune activation. Traumatic stress may disrupt stress-hormone pathways and inflammatory responses. But both disturbances appear capable of converging on common biological circuits controlling energy production, immune regulation and cellular resilience,” Pshezhetskiy said.
The lead researcher added, “When those systems become persistently dysregulated, the result may be the profound and disabling fatigue seen across multiple disorders.”
The researchers analysed DNA sequences using the Oxford BioDynamics’ EpiSwitch Orion platform, which examines the three-dimensional architecture of the genome, studying how DNA folds and interacts inside living cells.
The computational analysis looked at published genomic data for long Covid, PTSD, rheumatoid arthritis and multiple sclerosis—drawn from previous studies—which were combined with 3D genomic data from an earlier ME/CFS (myalgic encephalomyelitis/chronic fatigue syndrome) patient study, without needing to collect new patient samples.
“DNA is folded in our cells, so regions far apart in the linear sequence can touch, and those contact points are where genes get controlled. Orion predicts where these contact points are likely to be,” Ewan Hunter, chief data officer at Oxford BioDynamics, said.
Applied across the five conditions, Orion found that genetic changes that appeared to have little in common connected into the same regulatory circuitry.
Pshezhetskiy said, “We expected to find at least some overlap in genes across the conditions. But we actually found the opposite.”
“At an individual gene level, there was surprisingly little direct overlap between long Covid, ME/CFS, PTSD, multiple sclerosis and rheumatoid arthritis. But when we analysed how those genes interact in complex biological networks, a completely different picture emerged. Suddenly, the diseases appeared deeply connected,” the lead researcher said.
“This is not something you can see by reading the genetic sequence alone, which is why these conditions may have looked unrelated for so long,” Pshezhetskiy said.
The researcher explained that while the conditions might be triggered by completely different events, they ultimately disrupt the same fundamental biological systems and produce the similarly devastating exhaustion experienced by millions worldwide.
“Despite limited genetic overlap, substantial convergence at the network level suggests shared biological architecture across ME/CFS, LC19 (long Covid), PTSD, RA (rheumatoid arthritis), and MS (multiple sclerosis),” the authors wrote.
This post was last modified on September 3, 2026 3:36 pm