The experiences of cancer-related fatigue among Chinese children with leukaemia: A phenomenological study

The lived experience of fatigue in children and adolescents with cancer: a systematic review

“…[16-18, 24, 41] The youngest child was 6 years of age and only nine 7 year olds were included across the studies. Six studies focused solely on fatigue [18,34,36,40,44,46] while 5 studies reported on the spectrum of symptoms [10,35,37,43,45] with some containing minimal information about fatigue. Table 1 summarizes descriptors of fatigue from the perspective of children and adolescents with cancer.…”

“…[32] Of the 3,191 unique references identified by the search strategy, 86 were retrieved in full and assessed for eligibility. Of the retrieved full text publications, 68 were excluded, leaving a total of 18 publications which were included in this systematic review [10,16,17,24,[34][35][36][37][38][39][40][41][42][43][44][45][46]. Table 1 illustrates the characteristics of the included publications.…”

“…These interviews varied in length from 5 to 10 min to 1 h. One of these 7 studies supplemented the interviews with diaries. [44] One study solely used focus groups, [46] and one used diaries only [36]. One study used focus groups with the adolescent subsample participating in semi-structured interviews [18] and one study used questionnaire interview sheets [40].…”

“…Table 3 illustrates contributing and alleviating factors from the perspective of children and adolescents; these were reported in 4 studies [18,36,43,46]. Contributing factors included the hospital environment and an assumed side-effect of diagnosis or treatment.…”

“…Can't even make it up the stairs.B wasn't much I could do.B wiped out…and so tiredB exhausted, but it's like you haven't done anything…B …I felt weak and that sort of thingB I get tired all the time. Interestingly, in the study by Wu et al (2010) two quotes were reported by adolescents that alluded to an acceptance of fatigue as a symptom:…”