About Chronic Fatigue Syndrome

Looking around, you can see many people complaining of fatigue. In fact, it is known that about 24% of all patients who visit neighborhood clinics do so because they mainly complain of fatigue. Among patients who visit primary care physicians, 15–30% are reported to have fatigue symptoms lasting more than one month, and 10–20% are reported to have fatigue symptoms lasting or recurring for more than six months. People of all ages and genders may feel fatigued, but in general, women complain of fatigue more often than men, and elderly people over 60 complain of fatigue more often than younger people. Among patients who complain of fatigue, less than 50% have an underlying physical illness as the cause, but in patients over 40, fatigue due to a physical illness occurs about twice as often as in patients under 40.

Recently, there has been a trend of increasing numbers of patients complaining of fatigue due to stress. Chronic fatigue syndrome is also gradually increasing.

The problem is that the causes of fatigue symptoms are so varied that appropriate treatment should be provided according to the cause, but in many cases people self-diagnose and receive incorrect treatment. On this occasion, let us briefly look at the causes and countermeasures for chronic fatigue and chronic fatigue syndrome, as well as chronic fatigue syndrome itself.

1. Definition of Fatigue Fatigue (fatigue) is difficult to define simply because it has characteristics involving various aspects such as mental, physical, and social factors. However, in general, fatigue can be defined as an abnormal state of exhaustion after activity, a state of lacking energy and being unable to do work that requires sustained effort or concentration, or a state of being generally so low in energy that one cannot perform everyday activities.

2. Chronic Fatigue and Chronic Fatigue Syndrome Fatigue symptoms can be classified according to how long they last. Fatigue symptoms that persist for more than one month are called "persistent fatigue," and among them, fatigue symptoms that continue or recur for six months or more regardless of the cause are called "chronic fatigue." However, "chronic fatigue syndrome" refers to one of the causative diseases among the various causes that produce chronic fatigue symptoms.

In other words, chronic fatigue refers to the fatigue symptom itself, while chronic fatigue syndrome is a term referring to one of the underlying diseases that causes chronic fatigue, and it is a condition that can only be diagnosed when strict diagnostic criteria are met. Simply failing to find the cause of chronic fatigue does not mean it is chronic fatigue syndrome.

Patients who complain of chronic fatigue are very common, but patients who actually meet the criteria for chronic fatigue syndrome are rare. When the 1994 CDC case definition is applied, it is known that 0.42% of community residents and 2.6% of primary care physician patients meet the criteria, and in Korea, according to Kim Cheol-hwan and others, 1.22% of patients visiting primary care physicians were reported to have chronic fatigue syndrome.

So far, I have explained chronic fatigue syndrome. In the next part, we will take a closer look at the causes and symptoms of chronic fatigue syndrome.

Source: Korea Disease Control and Prevention Agency, National Health Information Portal