The Nature of Fatigue in Chronic Fatigue Syndrome

Abstract

In this article, we report the findings of our study on the nature of fatigue in patients diagnosed with chronic fatigue syndrome. Using ethnoscience as a design, we conducted a series of unstructured interviews and card sorts to learn more about how people with chronic fatigue syndrome describe fatigue. Participants (N = 14) described three distinct domains: tiredness, fatigue, and exhaustion. Most participants experienced tiredness prior to diagnosis, fatigue during daily life, and exhaustion after overexertion. We also discuss participants' ability to adapt to a variety of stressors and prevent shifts to exhaustion, and relate our findings to stress theory and other current research. Primary strategies that promoted adaptation to stressors included pacing and extended rest periods. These findings can aid health care professionals in detecting impending shifts between tiredness, fatigue, and exhaustion and in improving adaptive strategies, thereby improving quality of life.

Adolescent’s descriptions of fatigue, fluctuation and payback in chronic fatigue syndrome/myalgic encephalopathy (CFS/ME): interviews with adolescents and parents

“…Payback was described by all adolescents and has been found to be a universal symptom in adults with CFS/ME 18. Similar to adults with CFS/ME who described fatigue as: tiredness (feeling heavy, sleep disturbance), fatigue (eg, waking up tired, reduced daily activities) and exhaustion (eg, physical collapse, ‘so tired I fall over’),22 adolescents in this study described the same domains but ‘payback’ was used instead of ‘exhaustion’ and they did not always say ‘fatigue’ caused sedentary days. Our results are consistent with previous research where children described the intensity of symptoms fluctuating as well as ‘overextension’ making it worse, resulting in ‘paying the price.’15 40…”

“…Consensus is needed in order to be able to accurately assess the impact of fatigue and payback on patients and measure improvement from treatment. Recently, adults with CFS/ME described the nature of fatigue as three distinct domains: tiredness, fatigue and exhaustion 22. However, there is less qualitative evidence in children.…”

How older citizens engage in their health promotion: a qualitative research-driven taxonomy of experiences and meanings

“…Questions posed by researchers who adopt the ethnoscience method are usually broad and open - ended to elicit narratives from the participants and collect all possible statements, opinions and experiences from the respondents about the phenomenon under investigation. 27 All interviews were fully transcribed, and selected recurrent linguistic expressions used by interviewees to describe their health promotion experience were reported verbatim on cards: one linguistic expression per card (see the Data analysis section for further details). All interviewees were reinterviewed after the first phase of the data analysis to construct a shared taxonomy of their health promotion experiences in collaboration with the researchers.…”

Perceptions about the sexuality of women with fibromyalgia syndrome: a phenomenological study

“…FMS affects the physical, psychological and emotional functioning of the woman, showing symptoms such as fatigue (Olson et al . ), pain (Bazzichi et al . ) or depression (Orellana et al .…”