Depression, inactivity up teen girls’ fatigue risk
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Anxiety and depression and an inactive lifestyle can herald the development of persistent and severe fatigue in teen girls, according to the first study to look at fatigue in adolescent girls over time.
Dr. Cobi J. Heijnen of University Medical Center Utrecht in the Netherlands and colleagues found that one in four girls who reported being fatigued at the study’s outset were still fatigued one year later. “It’s a very constant phenomenon,” Heijnen told Reuters Health.
“In a normal healthy population of youngsters, there really is a group of young people who are as fatigued as grown-up fatigue patients are,” she said in an interview. “Most of the children still go to school but have many, many complaints.”
Heijnen and her team followed 653 adolescent girls to examine the stability of fatigue symptoms over the course of time, and to identify risk factors for the development and persistence of fatigue.
At the beginning of the study, 20.5 percent of the girls were severely fatigued. Study participants who weren’t initially fatigued but had symptoms of depression were more likely to have developed severe fatigue by the end of the study.
The girls who remained fatigued throughout the study—who represented 25.7 percent of those who were severely fatigued at the study’s outset—had “much higher” levels of depression and anxiety symptoms at the beginning of the study than those who weren’t fatigued at all or those who only experienced transient fatigue.
Being less physically active also increased the likelihood of developing severe fatigue, as did spending more time on nightlife activities. Less active girls were also more likely to be fatigued for the entire study period.
While the findings underscore the importance of teen girls’ emotional state in the development of fatigue, the answer isn’t to “send them to the psychiatrist” immediately, Heijnen said. “If you could just help the child to do more physical activity ... that would be important maybe to overcome this and to prevent more depression.”
It’s crucial to address fatigue in adolescence because fatigued teens run the risk of becoming chronically fatigued adults, Heijnen pointed out. “Fatigue can lead of course to many things and it can also become a more constant phenomenon, a chronic phenomenon, and that’s what you don’t want.”
SOURCE: Pediatrics, March 2008.
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