Two loci from a 635,969-person veteran health atlas study, not a dedicated ME/CFS study — and a real gap worth stating plainly: the dedicated studies making news this year, DecodeME and a 46,450-case meta-analysis, are not yet in the public GWAS Catalog this site draws from, so their findings are not here yet either.
Myalgic encephalomyelitis / chronic fatigue syndrome (ME/CFS) causes disabling fatigue, post-exertional malaise, and cognitive and sleep problems that do not resolve with rest. It has had a difficult scientific history — for decades doctors and researchers underfunded it and its biological basis was called into question. That has changed materially since 2020: long COVID pushed post-viral fatigue syndromes into mainstream research funding, and two genuinely large genetic studies have followed.
Both variants recorded here come from one paper: a 2024 Science study built a phenome-wide genetic atlas of 635,969 participants in the U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs Million Veteran Program, testing 2,068 different traits at once — everything from blood pressure to skin conditions to, among the 2,068, "Chronic fatigue syndrome." That is not the same thing as a study designed around ME/CFS specifically, and this page says so rather than presenting these two positions as more central to the disease than they are:
Two much larger, dedicated ME/CFS genetic studies are active in the research news as this page is being written. DecodeME, a patient-partnered UK study, tested 15,579 cases against 259,909 controls and found 8 genome-wide significant loci, three of them — near BTN2A2, OLFM4 and RABGAP1L — in genes that act in the body's response to viral or bacterial infection, which fits the long-standing clinical observation that ME/CFS often follows an infection. A separate 2026 meta-analysis spanning 46,450 cases and 2.46 million controls across 20 biobank-scale cohorts found 10 robust loci, six newly reported.
Neither study is in the GWAS Catalog this site draws its variant data from yet — checked directly against the catalogue's own records for this disease, which currently hold only the three earlier studies this page's two variants and its "not yet catalogued" note both come from. Rather than hand-typing rsIDs out of a preprint or a meta-analysis table, this page waits: the moment the GWAS Catalog carries DecodeME's or the meta-analysis's own loci, this site's ordinary collection pipeline will pick them up. That is a real gap, not a rounding error — LRRC4C and RALYL, the two genes held here, do not overlap BTN2A2, OLFM4 or RABGAP1L at all.
2026-09-16 · DecodeME study (Univ. of Edinburgh et al.), medRxiv preprint 2025; PMID:39024449 for our own 2 loci
DecodeME and a 2026 meta-analysis find real ME/CFS genetic risk loci
DecodeME (15,579 cases, 259,909 controls) found 8 ME/CFS risk loci, three in infection-response genes (BTN2A2, OLFM4, RABGAP1L); a separate 2026 meta-analysis (46,450 cases) found 10. Neither is in the public GWAS Catalog yet, so neither is on our new /conditions/chronic-fatigue-syndrome page -- which does hold 2 earlier-study loci (LRRC4C, near RALYL) that genuinely do not overlap DecodeME's genes. Published the honest gap rather than the news itself.
ME/CFS is diagnosed clinically, from symptoms and history, not from a genotype. Neither variant on this page is used by any guideline to diagnose the condition or predict who will develop it. Both come from one phenotype inside a much larger multi-trait study, not a study built around this disease.
The two dedicated large-scale studies described above — DecodeME and the 2026 meta-analysis — point toward immune and neurological biology, consistent with the clinical picture of a condition that often begins after an infection. Neither has reached this page yet because neither is in the public GWAS Catalog records this site verifies variants against.
What a 23andMe/AncestryDNA export or raw VCF can and can't tell you about Chronic Fatigue Syndrome (ME/CFS) comes down to these specific, well-studied positions — not a diagnosis.
Databases, guidelines and references
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Chronic Fatigue Syndrome (ME/CFS). MyGeneLog™. https://www.mygenelog.com/conditions/chronic-fatigue-syndrome
A disabling illness causing severe fatigue, post-exertional malaise (a worsening of symptoms after physical or mental effort), and cognitive and sleep problems that do not resolve with rest. It often follows an infection.
No. ME/CFS is diagnosed clinically, from symptoms and history. Both variants on this page come from one phenotype inside a large multi-trait genetic atlas study, not a study designed around this disease, and neither is used diagnostically by any guideline.
Two much larger, dedicated ME/CFS studies -- DecodeME and a 2026 biobank meta-analysis -- are active in the research news, but neither is yet indexed in the public GWAS Catalog this site verifies its variant data against. This site does not hand-type variants out of a preprint; it waits for the catalogue to index them, then collects them the same way as everything else here.
No. This page holds LRRC4C and a locus near RALYL; DecodeME's three infection-response loci are near BTN2A2, OLFM4 and RABGAP1L. Checked directly -- no overlap.
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