FISK JD, DOBLE SE; International Society of Technology Assessment in Health Care. Meeting.
Annu Meet Int Soc Technol Assess Health Care Int Soc Technol Assess Health Care Meet. 2001; 17: abstract no. 82.
Departments of Psychology, Psychiatry and Medicine and School of Occupational Therapy, Dalhousie University, Halifax, Canada
Introduction - The Fatigue Impact Scale (FIS) has been developed as a symptom-specific profile measure of health-related quality of life (HRQoL). Its item content reflects subjects' attribution of problems to fatigue in the areas of physical, cognitive, and psychosocial functioning. The FIS was initially developed for cross-sectional studies of medical conditions in which fatigue is a chronic symptom. Thus, it had not been designed to be a responsive measure of daily changes in fatigue. The present study describes the development and initial validation study of an adaptation of the FIS for use in conditions in which fatigue symptoms are of acute onset or have significant daily variation.Methods - Items for the Daily Fatigue Impact Scale (D-FIS) were selected from the pool of original FIS items with the aid of Rasch analyses of existing data. The reduced, 18-item FIS was administered to a sample of 93 subjects with flu-like illness, some of whom were followed for a 21-day period. Rasch analyses were used to further reduce the scale to a minimum number of items that represented a unidimensional measure of self-reported fatigue impact.Results - The resulting 8-item D-FIS demonstrated good relations to ratings of other flu symptoms and to general ratings of HRQoL. It also proved to be a responsive measure, demonstrating significant reduction in fatigue impact for those subjects that were followed longitudinally. Moreover, subjective ratings of fatigue impact were associated with work hours lost and estimated work productivity for those subjects who did work for pay during the study period.Conclusions - This initial validation study indicates that the D-FIS has considerable promise as a measure of the subjective daily experience of fatigue and as a specific HRQoL outcome measure.
Publication Types:
Keywords:
- Cross-Sectional Studies
- Fatigue
- Fatigue Syndrome, Chronic
- Language
- Periodicity
- Research Design
- Weights and Measures
- hsrmtgs
Other ID:
UI: 102274414
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