Sociodemographic & psychosocial correlates of fatigue & chronic fatigue: A cross-sectional study from a South East London community survey, 2025,Zhang

https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0022399925001102?via=ihub

Journal of Psychosomatic Research
Available online 8 May 2025, 112146
In Press, Journal Pre-proof
Short communication
Sociodemographic and psychosocial correlates of fatigue and chronic fatigue: A cross-sectional study from a South East London community survey

Shuo Zhang, Stephani L. Hatch, Matthew Hotopf, Sir Graham Thornicroft, Trudie Chalder, Jayati Das-Munshi

https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jpsychores.2025.112146
Open access

Highlights

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  There is a high prevalence of fatigue and chronic fatigue in urban populations
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  Those who report fatigue and chronic fatigue also report greater disability.
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  The quality of perceived social support is an important protective factor.

Abstract

Objective
A better understanding of fatigue and chronic fatigue symptoms in the community may lead to better targeted preventative interventions. This study aims to estimate the prevalence of fatigue and chronic fatigue and explore relationships with sociodemographic and psychosocial factors in a representative community population survey in London, UK.

Methods
The first wave of the South East London Community Health study (2008 to 2010) surveyed face-to-face 1698 individuals aged 16 years and over from 1075 randomly selected households in the boroughs of Southwark and Lambeth. Self-reported fatigue and/or chronic fatigue was determined using the Chalder fatigue scale. Ordinal and binary logistic regression analyses were undertaken to assess the association of sociodemographic and psychosocial factors with higher levels of fatigue symptoms.

Results
The point prevalence of fatigue was 23.5 % (95 % CI 21.5–25.7). After adjusting for age and sex, higher levels of fatigue were substantially associated with impacts on work and other activities due to physical (OR: 4.87 (95 % CI 3.44–6.88)) or emotional symptoms (OR: 4.52 (95 % CI, 3.16–6.48)). Higher levels of fatigue were also associated with seeking emotional help from professionals (OR: 2.73 (95 % CI, 1.91–3.92) or family or friends (OR: 2.37 (95 % CI,1.68–3.34) and reporting less perceived instrumental (OR: 2.01 (0.75–5.37)) and emotional support (OR: 3.76 (1.46–9.68)).

Conclusion
Our findings highlight the high prevalence of fatigue and chronic fatigue in a representative urban community sample. Higher levels of fatigue were significantly associated with greater disability and formal and informal help-seeking. The quality of perceived social support is an important protective factor.

Keywords
Fatigue
Chronic fatigue
Ethnicity
Sociodemographic factors
Social support
Community health survey

 

Hey that's only been done at least 50x, let's just re-do the last 4 decades at the most entry-level. That's just what real pros do, start over their own work doing the same pilot entry-level fishing studies they started with, exactly the same way they started.

Just like pro athletes keep going back to their amateur glory days when they didn't achieve much, and that one game where they almost, but did not, win the game single-handedly. Totally normal human behavior, do not look for the aliens behind the curtain.

No, I don't think so. The idea that people go and seek emotional help from health care professionals is ridiculous, let alone that this is a reason when the complaint is fatigue.

Looking at the paper does not inform in any way why they chose to frame this as 'emotional help'. Just entirely their decision and framing, for no other reason than to label it this way. Asinine fake research that completely under-performs compared to what complete amateurs can easily achieve.

 

I wouldn’t put it past them to claim that this shows that fatigue is normal, and therefore fatigued people should be able to work.

 

They seem to equate fatigue with tiredness, chronic fatigue with tiredness all the time and ME/CFS with tired all the time with a couple of other symptoms. Looking at the papers they reference is very telling, stuff about how people’s partners talked to them and their social support.

Here’s the results from their 12th reference “Social support and the persistence of complaints in chronic fatigue syndrome” (https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/15031590/)

That this sort of paper is coming from someone linked to King’s, an NHS Foundation Trust and a project funded by UKRI (https://www.phiuk.org/about) is a bit of a concern tbh. It either shows very little understanding or a deliberate motivation to not understand

 

Ah, the inappropriate questionnaires will continue until morale improves

 

Bit of a tangent but absolutely this, each and every one of us here has a far higher positive contribution to society than any of those quacks, whose net contribution is excessively negative. Probably compares to organized crime, because they have been so effective at spreading their harmful ideology.

In sports, there is the concept of "addition by subtraction", when a team trades a below-replacement player to another team and so improves their situation despite adding nothing. Sometimes it's even "for future considerations", simply offloading a bad contract. They added to their net value by subtracting a negative performing asset.

So much that it can actually be claimed that, though by a trivial amount, national GDP goes slightly up whenever a major psychosomatic quack retires. This is impossible to calculate but there is just zero question that this is true. Calling us dregs on society while we have a very low, but net positive, contribution while they have a giant net negative is, well, very symbolic of what they do.