Is Chronic Fatigue Common in Women?

June 12, 2007
Answered by FemHealth.Net

The incidence of fatigue and chronic fatigue syndrome (CFS) has resulted mainly from treated people and has been inclined by differential access to health-care management linked with gender, ethnic identification and social class. A recent study of Dr. Jason evaluated the cases of CFS in a community from Chicago.

Chronic fatigue syndrome (CFS) appeared as a diagnostic category in the last decade. Several prior studies suggested that CFS was a relatively rare disorder with a high level of prevalence in working white men. Many physicians minimized the seriousness of this condition and also interpreted the syndrome as being equivalent to a psychiatric disorder.
These positions had negative consequences for the treatment of CFS. To elucidate these presumptions, Dr. Jason and his team performed a community-based investigation to know the real facts on CFS.

Researchers from various universities (including DePaul University, University of Illinois, Northern Illinois University, among others) directed by Dr. Jason tried to discover the rate of prolonged fatigue and chronic fatigue in a socio-economically and ethnically diverse sample; and to find the relative occurrence of prolonged fatigue and chronic fatigue syndrome across race/ethnicity, socio-economic status and gender.

To accomplish this, the investigators studied a sample of 28,673 people in Chicago, Illinois, whom was tested by telephone, and those with CFS-like symptoms were medically tested. Dr Jason and his team also support his study on self-report questionnaires, psychiatric evaluations, and complete medical tests with laboratory testing which were used to diagnose patients with CFS.

They estimated the most significant symptoms of chronic fatigue syndrome (CFS) which is chronic fatigue, it is accompanied by various mixtures of other symptoms, including sore throats, muscle pains, unrefreshing sleep, and so on.

The way they used to analyze the data provided by the sources mentioned above was a statistical technique to delineate the total rate of CFS in this population, and its relative prevalence was subcategorized by sex, ethnic identification, age, and socioeconomic status. In addition, socioeconomic subgroups were examined amid symptom severity, functional disability, coping, optimism, perceived stress, and psychiatric comorbidity.

The investigation developed by Dr. Jason and colleagues pointed out the following results: There was a 65.1% completion rate for the telephone interviews during the first phase of the study. Results indicated that CFS occurs in about 0.42% of this random community-based sample. The highest levels of CFS were consistently found between women, minority groups, and subjects with lower levels of education and occupational status.

Conclusions pointed out that fatigue is frequent in urban populations. However, the highest levels of fatigue were consistently found amid women, and people with lower education and occupational levels.

Sources: JASON, Leonard, PhD. Et al. A Community-Based Study of Chronic Fatigue Syndrome.