Relationship of Self-reported Attentional Fatigue to Perceived Work Ability in Breast Cancer Survivors

Abstract

Breast cancer survivors (BCS) have identified attentional fatigue as a frequent and troublesome symptom during and following treatment. -4The ability to pay attention is necessary to complete tasks and activities, and problem solve. Attention requires ongoing mental effort. For BCS, the prolonged or intense use of attention to address the competing mental demands associated with illness, treatment and daily life activties, can lead to attentional fatigue and result in decreased effectiveness in activity. 5Attentional fatigue, a domain of cognitive function, is often used interchangeably with the terms cognitive dysfunction,cognitive impairment, cognitive fatigue or tiredness. Seminal research, however, delineates attentional fatigue from these other concepts by describing attentional fatigue as a measurable decrease in an individual's ability to focus and concentrate or to block out distractions when carrying out meaningful activities. 6 Hallmark indicators of attentional fatigue are: increased distractibility, difficulty following a train of thought or carrying out usual day-to-day activities, lapses in working memory, and increased impatience or frustration in personal interactions. 7Although the two may coexist, physical and attentional fatigue differ in that an individual may not be physically tired but has a reduced ability to exert mental effort. 8 Researchers have noted that BCS incur attentional fatigue more than age-matched controls 9 and prostate cancer patients. 10Merriman and colleagues, 11 found that up to 63% of

The associations between late effects of cancer treatment, work ability and job resources: a systematic review

“…Furthermore, when the complete Work Ability Index (WAI) was used to assess work ability the results were as follows. Suboptimal work ability was reported in 26% and 37% of cases (Von Ah et al 2017;Ho et al 2018) and among a population with a prostate cancer diagnosis in the previous 0-23 years (mean 4 years) and partially at work, 10% or 22% reported a reduction of their work ability (Fosså and Dahl 2015). As the studies made use of different ways to assess work ability at various moments after diagnosis and also included different types of cancer, case-control studies offer a possibility to make comparisons between workers with and workers without a past cancer diagnosis.…”

“…experiencing lower levels of attention, is regarded as a cognitive complaint. A significant relationship (β = 0.627, p < 0.001) between higher levels of attention and perceived work ability assessed by the complete WAI, was reported by Von Ah et al (Von Ah et al 2017). Attentional fatigue explained 40% of the variance in perceived work ability among 68 breast cancer survivors on average 5 years after diagnosis.…”

“…Six (17%) of the included studies (Von Ah et al 2017Ah et al , 2018Ho et al 2018;Hartung et al 2018;Gregorowitsch et al 2019;Couwenberg et al 2020) used the complete Work Ability Index (WAI), a questionnaire that consists of seven items. These 7 items are (1) current work ability compared with the lifetime-best (on a scale of 0-10),…”

“…Fifth, only 13 (36%) of the 36 studies mentioned the inclusion of self-employed workers; freelancers, or entrepreneurs Gudbergsson et al 2008a;Lee et al 2008;De Boer et al 2011;Torp et al 2017Torp et al , 2012Moskowitz et al 2014;Von Ah et al 2017;Cheung et al 2017;Hartung et al 2018;Ortega et al 2018;Wolvers et al 2019;Tamminga et al 2019). However, the self-employed might have different characteristics in regard to age, educational level, gender and decision latitude, as was reported in one of the studies (Torp et al 2017).…”

Predictors for earlier return to work of cancer patients

“…It is considered a multidimensional symptom (“physical, emotional and/or cognitive tiredness or exhaustion” are mentioned in a commonly-used definition (Berger et al [ 14 ])), but also unidimensional measures are frequently used and valid [ 15 ]. Cognitive fatigue [ 16 ] and more general measures of fatigue [ 17 ] affect work ability. Fatigue is named as an important problem at work [ 17 ] and was called “the main factor impeding RTW” in six qualitative studies [ 18 ].…”