The fatigue perception and its role in patient management

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.

Anahtar Kelimeler:

Depression, fatigue, perception, primary care

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