Abstracts

Rationale: Fatigue is usually defined as extreme and persistent tiredness, weakness or exhaustion that could be mental, physical or both. Fatigue has never been explored systematically in people with epilepsy, consequently, we know little about the severity, impact and phenomenology of fatigue in people with epilepsy. Methods: The main objective of this study was to validate three instruments to measure fatigue (Fatigue Symptom Inventory-FSI, Fatigue Assessment Instrument-FAI, Fatigue Severity Scale-FSS) in people with epilepsy, evaluate the prevalence of fatigue in people with epilepsy and its impact, severity and phenomenology. This study was a cross-sectional study. The evaluation of reliability of the fatigue questionnaires required two evaluations in the study (longitudinal part). We used concurrent validity as a method of validation. We applied the three selected questionnaires plus the Beck Depression Inventory (BDI) in 63 patients with epilepsy, 33 healthy patients and 44 patients with different neurological conditions such as: radiculopathy, headache and multiple sclerosis (MS). Pearson's correlations were used for the validation analysis. The reliability was asses also with Pearson's correlations. Cronbach's α (alpha) was used to evaluate internal consistency Results: We studied 140 patients. The scores of the FSI in patients with epilepsy was 4.28+1.36, for MS, in patients with other neurological conditions was 4.6+1.5, and in healthy patients was 2.68+1.16. The corresponding scores for the FAI were 3.99+2.07, 4.5+1.98 and 2.2+1.28. For the FSS the corresponding scores were 4.5+1.19, 4.46+1.21, and 3.03+1.08. The correlation between FSI and the BDI in patients with epilepsy was 0.48, for the FAI and the BDI was 0.53 and for the FSS (30) and the BDI was 0.57, all of them were statistically significant (p<0.05). Other analyses will be discussed. Conclusions: Patients with epilepsy have significant higher scores of fatigue than healthy patients but comparable with other neurological conditions. The scores of the instruments explored in this study have an acceptable correlation with the scores of the BDI. The selected questionnaires could potentially be used in studies of patients with epilepsy to measure fatigue. Patients with MS have comparable scores of fatigue than patients with epilepsy