A Study on Development of a Newly Devised Questionnaire for Measuring Fatigue and It's Application

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This study tested a new questionnaire for measuring overfatigue and it's application on health administration.In the newly devised questionnaire, the items consisting of 1) 10 questions concerned with subjective chronic fatigue symptoms with [yes or no] answers, 2) a linear scale ranging from [0] as no fatigue to [10] as very strong fatigue, 3) treatment of sickness and incidence at medical institutions per month or week, 4) holidays for most recent 1 month, 5) working hours for each day during the past 7 days, and 6) name, birth date, workplace and occupation, are confirmed, and compared with the other questionnaires in many previous studies.Using the new questionnaire, a field survey was performed for ca.1,400 blue and white collar workers. In this survey, in the groups with and without sickness, workers without fatigue defined as [0] score in both the 1st and 2nd item were 6.7% and 6.9% respectively, with overfatigue defined as [7] or over in both the 1st and 2nd item were 1.3%wt and 1.6% respectively. The ratio of the workers with overfatigue was significantly higher with increased overwork hours and subjective fatigue symptoms. Significant correlation between the number of subjective fatigue symptoms in the 1st item and the fatigue score in the 2nd item was found. This suggests that the combination of the 1st and 2nd item might to effective in measuring chronic fatigue.Moreover, using the health practice index (HPI) an other survey on ca.1,000 office workers and drivers was performed and analyzed by sex, age groups, work and work positions. The ratio of the workers with consistent strong stress and low level of health practice was 8.5% in the total subjects. The newly devised questionnaire and HPI may play an important role as a primary screening method in occupational health and preventive medicine.