Self-care and fatigue in individuals hospitalized with decompensated heart failure during the covid-19 pandemic: a cross-sectional study.
Laura da Silva Araujo, Kethlen Louise Palha Ferrari, Pedro Paulo Fernandes de Aguiar Tonetto and 3 others
PMID 41563300WHAT IT FOUND
Heart failure self-care scores were not linked to how tired patients felt or how much fatigue limited them among 132 patients hospitalized for decompensated heart failure.
Most had inadequate self-care maintenance and management before admission and were very or extremely tired last week.
Key findings
01No association was found between heart failure self-care scores and fatigue intensity or impact.
02Average self-care maintenance score was 54.1 and management score 60.6, both below the 70-point threshold for adequate self-care.
0339.4% felt very tired and 29.5% extremely tired; 49.2% could do very little and 20.5% only what they had to do.
STILL TO COME
How it was doneWhat they foundWhat it means for RNs
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What it does not show
This was a cross-sectional study, so it cannot show that fatigue caused poor self-care or that poor self-care led to hospitalization. The sample was non-probabilistic and came from one public tertiary hospital in Brazil, so it may not represent other heart failure populations. The authors could not calculate a sample size to make the association results confirmatory. Patients had to be clinically stable and without fatigue and/or dyspnea at interview, so the sample may exclude people with severe current symptoms. Participants reported self-care for the previous month and fatigue for the previous week while already hospitalized, so recall may be affected. Some self-care subscales had different numbers analysed: Maintenance 132, Management 131, Confidence 118.
Declared interests
No funding or conflict-of-interest information is provided in the supplied text.
The easy way to misread this
Do not conclude that poor self-care caused hospitalization or that fatigue caused poor self-care. This was a cross-sectional study, and no link was found between self-care scores and fatigue.