What’s in a name? Chronic fatigue syndrome, a condition that debilitates as many as 2.5 million people in the US with exhaustion, should be renamed systemic exertion intolerance disease, according to the US Institute of Medicine (IOM).

As well as the name-change, the IOM has this week proposed a five-point checklist for diagnosis. Because the cause of the condition, also known as myalgic encephalomyelitis or ME, remains unknown, identifying the condition can be difficult.

“Our goal was to facilitate diagnosis,” says Ellen Wright Clayton of Vanderbilt University in Nashville, Tennessee, and chair of the panel that drafted the report. “We hope these evidence-based diagnostic criteria provide a new foundation for future research regarding cause and treatment.”

Simon Wessely at King’s College London welcomes the criteria, but is less convinced by the name-change. “I’m concerned it may add to, not reduce, confusion around this condition,” he says.

This article will appear in print under the headline “Fatigue checklist”