Altered neuroendocrine control and association to clinical symptoms in adolescent chronic fatigue syndrome: a cross-sectional study

Table 2 Hormone levels among CFS patients and healthy controls

	CFS patients	Healthy controls	P value	P value, adjusted for gender, age, BMI, and depressive symptoms^a
Plasma norepinephrine—mean (SD)	1981 (777)	1497 (418)	<0.001	<0.001
Urine norepinephrine:creatinine ratio—median (IQR)	12.4 (5.8)	10.6 (5.8)	0.075	0.01
Plasma epinephrine—median (IQR)	308 (130)	267 (99)	0.002	<0.001
Urine epinephrine:creatinine ratio—median (IQR)	1.25 (1.22)	1.45 (0.99)	0.688	0.887
Plasma ACTH—median (IQR)	3.80 (2.70)	4.07 (2.90)	0.272	0.368
Plasma cortisol—mean (SD)	365 (145)	351 (149)	0.536	0.792
Urine cortisol:creatinine ratio—median (IQR)	3.45 (3.25)	5.34 (2.76)	0.001	0.002
Plasma TSH—mean (SD)	2.63 (1.08)	2.76 (1.43)	0.497	0.703
Plasma FT4—mean (SD)	15.4 (2.2)	14.6 (1.8)	0.008	0.015

Italic values indicate significance of p value (p < 0.05)
CFS chronic fatigue syndrome, SD standard deviation, IQR interquartile range, ACTH adrenocorticotrophic hormone, TSH thyroid stimulating hormone, FT4 free thyroxine
^aApplying multivariate linear regression modelling. In order to obtain an approximate normal distribution for all dependent variables, urine norepinephrine:creatinine ratio and urine cortisol:creatinine ratio was ln-transformed, and three extreme outliers for plasma epinephrine were removed and replaced by imputed values

ISSN: 1479-5876