Lupus Fatigue and the FSS Scale Scores

Tracking your lupus fatigue helps identify factors that may help or exacerbate your symptoms.

Are you tracking? In the last two weeks, over 350 people have used Facebook Messenger (to start tracking, just type: FSS) to track their fatigue using the Fatigue Severity Scale (FSS). Below, we will look at the responses to see how the LupusCorner community is doing! And, as always, when you complete the scale, be sure to track exercise, medications, and more!

Over 350 people have taken the FSS scale. Here is how the results look:

Note: the scale consists of 9 questions rated from 1 – 7 (Strongly Disagree to Strongly Agree). Final score is calculated by taking the average of all responses. If any responses in a given run were invalid (e.g., greater than 7, contained words), the entire response was disqualified.

Average score: 6.04 / 7

Median: 6.33 / 7

Lupus Fatigue Severity Scale (FSS) Results

This is a box and whisker plot is an easy way to visualize the responses that we received. The edges of the boxes highlight the quartiles, with the line between the boxes being the median. It shows where the majority of the responses fell. The whiskers show variability outside of the upper and lower quartiles.

So, how much lupus fatigue are the respondents feeling?

Hmm it does seem like quite a bit. The average scores were relatively high, considering that the Veteran’s Affairs office had noted that an average score of a person with lupus is 4.6.

How could this be? As the respondents have participated voluntarily, it is very possible, even likely, that the people most likely to respond were prone to rating their fatigue at a high level because they currently were experiencing higher fatigue. That is to say, people feeling high levels of fatigue were more likely to read the article and take the scale. It is also possible that the VA’s number is too low.

How can we tell? Be sure to continue to take the FSS scale each week an record exercise, medication habits, foods eaten, and other elements that you may think are impacting your fatigue.

The easiest way to take the FSS? Visit us on Facebook and us a message that says: FSS

Click here to send us a Facebook Message