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. 2023 Apr;45(4):344-362.
doi: 10.1177/01939459221128125. Epub 2022 Nov 4.

Sickness Symptoms in Kidney Transplant Recipients: A Scoping Review

Choa Sung  1 , Patricia Ensweiler Hershberger  2 , Mark B Lockwood  1
Affiliations

Sickness Symptoms in Kidney Transplant Recipients: A Scoping Review

Choa Sung et al. West J Nurs Res. 2023 Apr.

Abstract

Sickness symptoms (depressive symptoms, anxiety, and fatigue) are common among people with chronic illness, often presenting as a symptom cluster. Sickness symptoms persist in many patients with chronic kidney disease, even after kidney transplantation (KT); however, little is known about sickness symptom-induced burden in KT recipients. This scoping review synthesizes available evidence for sickness symptoms in KT recipients, including findings on symptom prevalence, predictors, outcomes, interrelationships, and clustering. Among 38 reviewed studies, none identified sickness symptoms as a cluster, but we observed interrelationships among the symptoms examined. Fatigue was the most prevalent sickness symptom, followed by anxiety and depressive symptoms. Predictors of these symptoms included demographic, clinical, and psychosocial factors, and health-related quality of life was the most researched outcome. Future research should use common data elements to phenotype sickness symptoms, include biological markers, and employ sophisticated statistical methods to identify potential clustering of sickness symptoms in KT recipients.

Keywords: anxiety; depression; fatigue; kidney transplantation; scoping review; sickness behavior.

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Conflict of interest statement

Declaration of Conflicting Interests

The authors declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.

Figures

Figure 1.
Figure 1.
Theoretical Framework of Sickness Symptoms in Kidney Transplant Recipients. Adapted from Corwin et al.’s (2021) theoretical framework.
Figure 2.
Figure 2.
Study Screening Flow Diagram.
See this image and copyright information in PMC

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