The fatigue perception and its role in patient management

Year 2018, Volume: 45 Issue: 1, 77 - 84, 17.03.2018

Ceyhun Yurtsever , Turan Set Elif Ateş

https://doi.org/10.5798/dicletip.407248

Cited By: 1

Abstract

Objective:
Fatigue is one of the most common complaints in primary care. Patients' fatigue
perceptions may be very different from each other. We aimed to determine the
fatigue perception and its relationship with fatigue severity, sociodemographic
characteristics, history, physical examination and laboratory findings in
patients with complaints of fatigue.

Methods:
This study was carried out as a cross-sectional study in a tertiary family
medicine clinic between June 2016 and June 2017. All patients aged 18 years and
over who were complaining of fatigue for at least 1 month were invited to
study. Fatigue perceptions of volunteers who agreed to participate in the study
(n = 116) were evaluated with a structured form prepared by researchers.
Fatigue severity was measured using Fatigue Severity Scale and Checklist
Individual Strength surveys. Patients’ records including history, physical
examination and laboratory results were included in the study.

Results:
The mean age of participants was 29.5 ± 9.8 years and 87.9% were female. We
asked patients “what do they mean by fatigue?” and “what fatigue complaints
contain?”. Tiredness, lack of energy and sleeplessness - somnolence - desire to
sleep were the most common answers. Expression that had the highest score from
the fatigue severity scales was the needle hurt sensation for all body. In
patients’ records, the most common findings in patients with fatigue were
vitamin D deficiency (84.5%), sleeping problem (72.8%) and depression (69%).
When the relationship between fatigue perceptions and possible etiologic
factors was examined, it was observed that most of them were related with the
depression risk. As a result, it was observed that seven different findings
affected nineteen different fatigue perceptions.

Conclusion:
In this study, fatigue perception has been shown to be as important as other
features. The physicians should investigate its content and try to understand
the patient.

Keywords

Depression, fatigue, perception, primary care

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