Epidemiological Study of Chronic Fatigue Syndrome and its Relation to Psychiatric Difficulties in Nurses

The present project studied epidemiology of Chronic Fatigue Syndrome (CFS) and its relation to psychiatric difficulties in female nurses. These nurses were employed at educational hos- pitals under the auspices of Tehran and Ahvaz Universities of Medical Sciences.The project’s subjects were 1263 nurses;175 of them were selected through census sampling from the city of Ahvaz and 1088 were selected from Tehran via stratified random sampling.To collect data, the followings were used: General Health Questionnaire (GHQ), Chalder of Fatigue Scale (COFS), Krupp Fatigue Severity Scale (KFSS), Whitely Index (WI), and clinical interviews. This evaluation showed that the prevalence of CFS was 7.3% in all nurses under study. The prevalence was 3.4% and 7.9% in nurses from Universities of Ahvaz and Tehran respectively. Furthermore,the prevalence of the syndrome was 7.9% in married nurses and 6.5% in nurses who were single.There was a significant correlation between fatigue and hypochondriasis, somatic com- plaints, anxiety and sleep disturbances, social dysfunction and depression. The nurses employed at Universities of Tehran and Ahvaz lack suitable mental health con- dition.