Assessing Fatigue in Patients with Inflammatory Bowel Disease

Fatigue in inflammatory bowel disease (IBD) has been reported to be a major issue in terms of its understanding, assessment, and management, for both patients and clinicians. This paper summarises the results of three separate but interlinked studies reporting on: health-care practitioners' perceptions of fatigue in IBD patients, an IBD fatigue patient self-assessment scale, and a checklist to assess the possible reversible factors contributing to fatigue. Health-care practitioners reported a lack of understanding of fatigue and a need for more information and education to help them to address fatigue in a constructive manner in clinical consultations. The IBD fatigue patient self-assessment questionnaire is a helpful tool to assess fatigue in a systematic manner, and provides a quantifiable score of the level of fatigue experienced by an individual. The screening checklist for IBD fatigue provides a valuable tool to identify the priorities for testing for clinically potentially reversible causes of fatigue.