Fatigue and Vitamin D Status in Iranian Female Nurses

INTRODUCTION: Given that nurses are among professions with frequent ‎problems of fatigue, and given the nature of their profession that ‎provides little exposure to sunlight and the subsequent deficiency of vitamin D, the ‎present study examined the relation between fatigue and circulating vitamin D levels ‎in female nurses working in Shahid Beheshti Hospital, Kashan, Iran in 2013. ‎

MATERIAL & METHODS: This cross-sectional study was conducted in 200 female nurses working in Shahid Beheshti Hospital. To measure fatigue, fatigue questionnaire containing 9 ‎questions eliciting the subject’s feeling in scales of 1 to 7, getting a possible score of 9 to ‎‎63, and Visual Analogue Scale ‎in which nurses specified their fatigue in a band of zero to 10 were used. ‎The 25-hydroxyvitamin D, which is the most important vitamin D metabolite, also was determined. The data was analyzed by SPSS-16. The Pearson’s correlation of coefficients, t-test, and multiple regression analysis were used in this study.‎

RESULTS: The mean fatigue score of nurses was 38.76±12.66 in questionnaire and 5.73±2.12 in Visual Analog Scale. The 89 per cent of nurses suffered from vitamin D deficiency, ‎‎9.5 percent of them had normal level and 1.5 per cent had toxicity level of vitamin D.‎ There was a significant relationship between vitamin D level and fatigue scores (P<0.0001), and visual fatigue scores (P<0.0001). According to multivariate regression analysis, vitamin D level accounted for 13 per cent ‎of the fatigue based on data on questionnaire and‎ ‎18.6 per cent of ‎fatigue according to Visual Analog Scale. ‎

CONCLUSION: High prevalence of fatigue among nurses could be attributed to vitamin D ‎deficiency.