A comparison of alternative ways of measuring fatigue among patients having hysterectomy.

In a study of the outcomes of hysterectomy, 1,205 patients rated their fatigue levels via three single-item measures and the Profile of Mood States (POMS) Fatigue Scale. The single-item fatigue measures asked patients to indicate how often they were tired during the day, how often feeling tired had prevented them from doing what they wanted to do, and how big a problem feeling tired was for them. All four measures of fatigue were found to be correlated with pain, activity limitation, and psychological dysfunction, although the POMS Fatigue Scale was more strongly related to psychological dysfunction than the other fatigue measures. All four measures indicated substantial relief from fatigue 6 months after hysterectomy among the participants in this study. Patients who remained or became fatigued by 6 months posthysterectomy had more physician contacts than those not fatigued, and were less satisfied with the results of the surgery. Fatigue was found to be a useful outcome measure of medical treatment. Each of the fatigue measures examined provided unique and useful information, with no one fatigue measure proving to be substantially superior to the others.