Nothing prepared Linda C. Johnson of Indianapolis for the fatigue that descended on her after a diagnosis of stage 4 lung cancer in early 2020....CONTINUE READING
Initially, Johnson, now 77, thought she was depressed. She could barely summon the energy to get dressed in the morning. Some days, she couldn’t get out of bed.
But as she began to get her affairs in order, Johnson realized something else was going on. However long she slept the night before, she woke up exhausted. She felt depleted, even if she didn’t do much during the day.
“People would tell me, ‘You know, you’re getting old.’ And that wasn’t helpful at all. Because then you feel there’s nothing you can do mentally or physically to deal with this,” she tells KFF Health News.
Fatigue is a common companion of many illnesses that beset older adults: heart disease, cancer, rheumatoid arthritis, lung disease, kidney disease, and neurological conditions like multiple sclerosis, among others. It’s one of the most common symptoms associated with chronic illness, affecting 40 percent to 74 percent of older people living with these conditions, according to a 2021 review
by researchers at the University of Massachusetts.
This is more than exhaustion after an extremely busy day or a night of poor sleep. It’s a persistent whole-body feeling of having no energy, even with minimal or no exertion. “I feel like I have a drained battery pretty much all of the time,” wrote a user named Renee in a Facebook group for people with polycythemia vera, a rare blood cancer. “It’s sort of like being a wrung-out dish rag.”
Fatigue doesn’t represent “a day when you’re tired; it’s a couple of weeks or a couple of months when you’re tired,” says Dr. Kurt Kroenke, a research scientist at the Regenstrief Institute in Indianapolis, which specializes in medical research, and a professor at Indiana University’s School of Medicine.
When he and colleagues queried nearly 3,500 older patients
at a large primary care clinic in Indianapolis about bothersome symptoms, 55 percent listed fatigue — second only to musculoskeletal pain (65 percent) and more than back pain (45 percent) and shortness of breath (41 percent).
Separately, a 2010 study
in the Journal of the American Geriatrics Society estimated that 31 percent of people 51 and older reported being fatigued in the past week.
The impact can be profound. Fatigue is the leading reason for restricted activity in people 70 and older, according to a 2001 study
by researchers at Yale. Other studies have linked fatigue with impaired mobility, limitations in people’s abilities to perform daily activities, the onset or worsening of disability, and earlier death.
What often happens is older adults with fatigue stop being active and become deconditioned, which leads to
