Objective: study fatigue as a key non-motor symptom of parkinson’s disease

Background: Fatigue in PD refers to a state of fatigue, lack of energy, a feeling of physical and/or mental exhaustion. In fact, fatigue can occur at any stage of Parkinson’s, and many people report that fatigue is one of the symptoms that affects them the most. It can have a greater impact on your quality of life than motor symptoms like stiffness, slowness or walking problems..Observational studies of fatigue suggest a predominantly chronic course of this disorder. Fatigue persisted in patients at diagnosis at the start of follow-up, along with rare cases of its primary occurrence during the nine years of the study. Researchers still don’t know what causes fatigue in PD. It is probably a combination of interacting causes, only some of which we understand and can change.  Poor physical condition can worsen fatigue, and for some people, exercise can improve fatigue.Due to the lack of development of the pathophysiological concept, there are essentially no approaches to the treatment of fatigue.Diagnosis of fatigue is hampered by the subjectivity of this feeling, the lack of objective monitoring criteria, as well as instrumental methods for its assessment.

Method: The four recommended scales, the Fatigue Severity Scale, the Chronic Disease Therapy Functional Assessment-Fatigue, the Parkinson Fatigue Scale, and the Visual Analogue Fatigue Scale (VAFS) were tested against measures of quality of life including cognition, depression, sleep, life orientation, physical activity, and symptoms. . PD in 15 PD subjects and 8 caregivers.The four recommended scales, the Fatigue Severity Scale, the Chronic Disease Therapy Functional Assessment-Fatigue, the Parkinson Fatigue Scale, and the Visual Analogue Fatigue Scale (VAFS) were tested against measures of quality of life including cognition, depression, sleep, life orientation, physical activity, and symptoms. .

Results: 27% of PD patients rated fatigue as one of the top three most worrisome symptoms. Fatigue structures were recorded in one dimension, accounting for 67% of the total variance, of which the VAFs showed the highest internal consistency. The highest likelihood ratio gave a cutoff.

Conclusion: To determine the relationship between perceived fatigue and quality of life, a canonical correlation analysis was performed using fatigue scales as criterion variables and quality of life measures as predictor variables.

References: 1. Tseng BY, Gajewski BJ, Kluding PM. Reliability, responsiveness, and validity of the visual analog fatigue scale for measuring exercise fatigue in people with chronic stroke: a pilot study. Stroke treatment. 2010. https://doi.org/10.4061/2010/412964.
2. Bijur PE, Silver W, Gallagher EJ. Reliability of the Visual Analogue Scale for Measuring Acute Pain. Acad Emerge Med. 2001;8(12):1153-7.
3. Тseng BY, Gajewski BJ, Kluding PM. Nadezhnost’, otzyvchivost’ i validnost’ vizual’noy analogovoy shkaly ustalosti dlya izmereniya ustalosti ot nagruzki u lyudey s khronicheskim insul’tom: predvaritel’noye issledovaniye. Lecheniye insul’ta. 2010.

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MDS Abstracts - https://www.mdsabstracts.org/abstract/fatigue-at-different-stages-of-parkinsons-disease/