Fatigue
Summary of Key Points
Incidence
• Fatigue affects most patients with cancer, regardless of the stage of disease or the type of anticancer therapy used.
• Cancer-related fatigue (CFR) affects an estimated 80% to 90% of outpatients with cancer who receive either chemotherapy or radiation therapy.
• CRF can be persistent in cancer survivors.
• Determining the exact incidence requires standardized methods to define, diagnose, and measure CRF.
Staging Evaluation
• No standardized measurement tools exist except for International Classification of Diseases–10 criteria, which have not been widely adopted.
• Using National Comprehensive Cancer Network guidelines, patients report levels of fatigue using a numeric rating scale of 0 to 10. This numeric rating scale is currently used as a screening tool.
