A Comparison of Self-Reported Fatigue and Fatigue-Regulating Behaviors of Rheumatoid Arthritic Patients and Normal Persons

류마티스관절염 환자와 정상인의 피로도 및 피로조절행위 비교

The purpose of this study is to compar self-reported fatigue and fatigue-regulating behaviors of rheumatoid arthritic patients and normal persons. This study collected the data from 75 rheumatoid arthritic patents visited the departments of internal medicine or orthopedics of four general hospitals T-city and K-city by means of direct interview and questionnaires. in this study also collected data from 75 normal persons who had not been exposed to any other disease in T-city and K-city by means of direct interviews anti questionnaires which were conducted by two trained nurses. This experiment was conducted from August 1, 1998 to October 15, 1998. This study used both MAP(Multi-Dimentional Assessment of Fatigue) developed by Belza(1995) to measure fatigue and the measurement developed by Kwon, Young-Eun to investigate fatigue regulating behaviors. The collected materials were analyzed by means of descriptive statistics, t-test, and the ANCOVA according to the SPSS PC+ program. The findings are as follows : 1. There was the statistically significant difference(t =5.07, p=.000), between rheumatoid arthritic patients(32.76 points) and normal persons(25.81 points) in t-test comparison by group about fatigue. A fatigue degree of rheumatoid arthritic patient group was high in five kinds of lower realms such as common fatigue degree, fatigue severity to be experienced, distress due to fatigue, daily fatigue degree, and fatigue timing at the last week by dimension. 2. There was the significant difference in the number of fatigue-regulating behaviors between rheumatoid of fatigue arthritic patients(9.37 times) and normal persons (8.15 times), but there wasn't any significant difference in the efficiency between rheumatoid arthritic patients(2.85 points) and normal persons (2.78 points) This research suggests two kinds of things as follows : 1. It is necessary to develop an educational program for improving efficiency of fatigue-regulating behaviors as well as some nursing arbitration measures for reducing fatigue of rheumatoid arthritic patients. 2. It is necessary for the future studies to continuously grasp characteristics of fatigue by gender variable by selecting more rheumatoid arthritic male patients.