Exactly How Tired are Cancer Patients?

Seems like a hard question to answer, doesn't it: Exactly how tired are you? More or less tired than yesterday morning? More or less tired than two days ago at noon? Since quantifying fatigue is pretty tough, it's also tough to determine if your condition is getting better or worse.

Sure, there's a general feeling, a suspicion that maybe things are improving... or not improving... but wouldn't it be nice to put a number on it and track it? A handful of researchers thought so, and managed to do just that in a study published in the journal Psychosomatics.

About the Study

According to the study, cancer patients' fatigue is usually measured with symptom inventories that reflect each patient's experience over the previous days or weeks. The researchers went a different route and strapped a prototype "fatigue monitor" to 34 cancer patients for three days. The instructions? Record your level of fatigue every hour you're awake for the next three days.

Results of the Study

Now, the results will likely make you shake your head and mutter, "Well, it was a good try." Why? Because they failed to find any real pattern, even for an individual, except that people tend to get more tired in the evening. Yeah, it's a stunner.

Too few people participated in the study to allow the researchers to look into some things that would've been interesting. For example, maybe cancer patients' fatigue would have varied by gender, type of cancer, cancer stage, or type of treatment. One interesting statistic did come out of the researchers' efforts, though: Cancer patients consider their fatigue "moderate to extreme" about 33 percent of the time.

How the Study May Apply to You

You could follow the researchers' lead if you want to determine your overall level of fatigue. Just keep a notepad with you and each hour, jot down whether you're feeling mildly, moderately, or extremely tired. Three days later, you'll have a list of "data" you can use to quantify how often, and to what degree, you're experiencing fatigue.

• Feel Like You Have a Colander for a Brain?

_{Source: Dimsdale, J. and Ancoli-Israel, S. "Taking Fatigue Seriously, II: Variability in Fatigue Levels in Cancer Patients. Psychosomatics 48 (Jun. 2007): 247-252. Accessed 5 May 2007.}