FROM THE JOURNAL OF RHEUMATOLOGY
A new study has identified three distinct trajectories of fatigue levels in patients with early symptomatic osteoarthritis (OA) in the knee and hip, report Jadran Botterman, MSc, and coauthors from the department of psychology, health, and technology at the University of Twente (the Netherlands).
Six years of data were collected from the CHECK (Cohort Hip and Cohort Knee) participants and then separated into distinct trajectories using growth mixture modeling. Three distinct fatigue trajectories were found: low fatigue, low to high fatigue, and high fatigue.
The authors found a significant association between trajectory and patient characteristics. Women, patients with comorbid disease, and patients using medications were more likely to have a high fatigue trajectory, Dr. Botterman and his colleagues reported.
“Identification of these trajectories with differing patient characteristics may warrant tailored psychosocial interventions for patients with elevated levels of fatigue,” the authors concluded.
Read the full article in the Journal of Rheumatology .
