Patients who consult with tiredness: frequency of consultation, perceived causes of tiredness and its association with psychological distress

Abstract

Background: Few prospective studies have been carried out in primary care on patients presenting with tiredness.

Aim: A study was undertaken to describe patients whose main complaint was fatigue or of being "tired all the time'.

Method: Over one year, doctors in four practices in Lancashire, Mid-Glamorgan, Suffolk and Surrey recruited 220 patients aged 16 years or more presenting with fatigue, and matched them with a comparison group from their lists. The general health questionnaire, a fatigue questionnaire and an attribution questionnaire were used to measure outcomes over six months. General practice records of consultations were also examined.

Results: Patients consulting for tiredness attended the doctor significantly more frequently than the comparison group both in the six months before and after entering the study. The frequency of attending could not be related to the duration or severity of fatigue alone. The majority consulting with tiredness scored highly on the general health questionnaire but so also did patients with equivalent fatigue scores in the comparison group. The correlation between fatigue and general health questionnaire scores was close for those patients who still had high fatigue scores six months later than it was for patients on entry to the study. Six months following study entry 61% of patients perceived the cause of the tiredness to be physical, while 57% of doctors viewed the problem as psychological. A small number of patients changed their views during the six months follow up from physical to psychological attributions.

Conclusion: Patients consulting for tiredness are likely to report symptoms of psychological distress and attend more frequently than other patients. They tend to view the problem as physical while their doctors view the problem as psychological. Having established that there is no physical problem, doctors may need to focus more on sharing ideas and explanations when patients complain of being "tired all the time'.