Abstract

Background: Children and adolescents with cancer experience some complications such as pain, depression, and fatigue that impact the quality of life. Fatigue is one of the most common cancer treatment problems in most children with cancer. Objectives: The purpose of this study was to construct a comprehensive instrument to examine fatigue in patients with cancer (4 - 18 years). Methods: This descriptive study was conducted on 101 children with cancer. A questionnaire was designed to examine fatigue in patients with cancer (4 - 18 years) using similar studies. The questionnaire reliability was determined using the Cronbach's alpha and test-retest method. Face validity of the questionnaire was assessed by professionals. To determine the construct validity, factor analysis was run. Data were analyzed using SPSS (version 16). Results: The mean age of the patients was 9.54 ± 3.97 years and the mean duration of the cancer 12.82 ± 2.66 months. Cronbach's alpha for whole scale and for all dimensions was 0.93 and more than 0.8 (excellent score). Intraclass correlation coefficient (ICC) for whole scale and for all dimensions of questionnaire was 0.92 and more than 0.8, respectively. According to factor analysis method, three extracted dimensions of the questionnaire were: daily activities and general problems (11 items), sleep problems (9 items), as well as mental states and emotions (5 items). Conclusions: This study showed that validity and reliability of the cancer-related fatigue questionnaire for patients with cancer (4 - 18 years) are acceptable and suitable for Iranian culture. Copyright © 2018, Journal of Comprehensive Pediatrics. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/) which permits copy and redistribute the material just in noncommercial usages, provided the original work is properly cited.