Fatigue in early Parkinson's disease / 中华老年医学杂志

ABSTRACT

Objective To investigate the prevalence,characteristics and risk factors of fatigue in a large cohort of subjects with early Parkinson's disease (PD).Methods A total of 391 individuals with PD,recruited in Linzhi trial,were re-screened.Early,non-depressed subjects [Center for epidcmiological survey depression scale (CES-D)＜16]underwent further fatigue assessment.Subjects who scored＞4 on fatigue severity scale (FSS) were classified as fatigue.Motor symptoms and PD severity were assessed using the unified Parkinson's disease rating scale (UPDRS) and Hoehn-Yahr scale.Other clinical measures,including sleep disorder by Pittsburg sleep quality index (PSQ-Ⅰ),mental function by Alzheimer's Disease assessment scale-cognitive sections (ADAS-Cog) and quality of life by medical outcomes study short form 36 (SF- 36) were also evaluated.Results Among 204 subjects who completed fatigue measures,82 (40.2％) were classified as fatigue.The fatigue group had significantly more neurological impairment by higher scores on each subsets of UPDRS including mentation (P＜0.05),activities of daily living (P＜0.01) and motor (P＜0.01),while the subjects with fatigue had worse scores on SF-36 (P＜0.01).Multiple regression analyses showed that motor subset of UPDRS was the variable that had the predictive value for FSS score.The full model explained 6.4％ of the variance of the FSSscore (β=0.039,95％CI0.019-0.059).However,other factors,including levodopa dosage,PSQ-Ⅰ,and ADAS-Cog score did not significantly contribute to the model.Conclusions Fatigue is a frequent symptom in carly,non-depressed patients with PD,affecting over 40％ of the patients in this cohort.The small correlation between fatigue and motor score,and the lack of association with dosage of dopaminergic treatment suggest that dopaminergic pathways might be only moderately involved in pathogenesis of fatigue.