Underlying disease risk among patients with fatigue: a population-based cohort study in primary care
Becky White, Nadine Zakkak, Cristina Renzi, Meena Rafiq, Arturo Gonzalez-Izquierdo, Spiros Denaxas, Brian D Nicholson, Georgios Lyratzopoulos, Matthew E Barclay · 2025
Read Underlying disease risk among patients with fatigue: a population-based cohort study in primary care by Becky White, Nadine Zakkak, Cristina Renzi, Meena Rafiq, Arturo Gonzalez-Izquierdo, Spiros Denaxas, Brian D Nicholson, Georgios Lyratzopoulos, Matthew E Barclay (2025) in the Tower of Babel, a free online library of public-domain works preserved in clean, searchable text. No sign-up. The full text is served as a plain-text file at a predictable URL, where text is present: https://antarctic-labs.com/tower-of-babel/pmc-11653409.txt.
Description
Becky White and eight co-authors ask what a new complaint of fatigue in primary care signals. Using English health records from 2007 to 2017, they followed about 305,000 people who came in with fresh fatigue and about 424,000 who came in without it. The team compared how often 237 diseases appeared in each group. Far more diseases showed up at higher rates after fatigue: 127 of them in men and 151 in women.
The strongest links were depression, chest infections, sleep problems, and thyroid imbalance in women. By age eighty, cancer ranked third among diseases in men with fatigue, with about double the rate of the comparison group. In women, cancer stayed uncommon at every age. The authors support checking older men with fatigue for cancer first, but not women on fatigue alone. The paper appeared in 2024, though the catalog lists 2025.
Catalog record
| CREATOR | Becky White, Nadine Zakkak, Cristina Renzi, Meena Rafiq, Arturo Gonzalez-Izquierdo, Spiros Denaxas, Brian D Nicholson, Georgios Lyratzopoulos, Matthew E Barclay |
|---|---|
| YEAR | 2025 |
| COLLECTION | PAPERS |
| FORMAT | TXT |
| FILE SIZE | 42 KB |
| VERSION | 1.0 |
| LICENSE | CC BY 4.0 |
| RIGHTS | CC BY |
| SOURCE | Europe PMC |