Correlates of fatigue in older adults with rheumatoid arthritis.

The purposes of this study were to describe the prevalence of fatigue, examine the association between fatigue and doctor visits, and identify correlates of fatigue in rheumatoid arthritis (RA). On average, a high degree of fatigue was reported to occur every day, to remain constant during the course of a week, and to most often affect walking and household chores. When controlling for disease severity and insurance coverage, respondents who reported more fatigue made more visits to the rheumatologist than those reporting less fatigue. A regression model with fatigue as the dependent variable revealed that the following variables explained a significant amount of variance: pain rating, functional status, sleep quality, female gender, comorbid conditions, and duration of disease.