The relationship between sleep and fatigue in chronic fatigue syndrome Seminar

Time:: 12:30 - 13:30
Date:: 12 November 2015
Venue:: University of Southampton Highfield Campus Building 44 (Shackleton) Room 3031/3033

For more information regarding this seminar, please telephone Sue McNally on 02380 595150 or email S.McNally@soton.ac.uk .

Event details

In addition to their primary complaint of fatigue, people with chronic fatigue syndrome (CFS) report problems such as hypersomnia, broken sleep and feeling unrefreshed on awakening, which are often distressing to them. Researchers have questioned whether improvements in sleep brought about by treatment may be one mechanism for improvements in fatigue.

In this talk I will present a body of work that has been carried out at Manchester which aims to shed light on the relationship between sleep and fatigue in CFS. First, I will briefly review what we know about sleep in chronic fatigue syndrome, and will outline the findings from a recent systematic review which we carried out to examine the effectiveness of recommended treatments for CFS at improving sleep.

Next I will describe the results of a mediation analysis of sleep data from a treatment trial, in which we tried to tease out the role of improvements in sleep in improvements in fatigue. Finally, I will describe a daily diary study which tested whether both self-reported and actigraphy-derived measures of sleep were associated with next day fatigue and investigated whether negative mood played a mediating role in observed relationships. The talk will end with recommendations for future research

Speaker information

Professor Alison Wearden , University of Manchester. I graduated in Psychology from the University of Manchester in 1977, and then went on to obtain a Diploma in Social Administration and Social Work in 1979. After working for nine years as a Probation Officer and four years at home caring for children, I returned to Psychology in 1993 when I worked on some research looking at age and IQ effects in timing. I worked as a researcher from 1993 to 1999 until taking up my post as lecturer in Psychology in January 2000. I obtained an MSc entitled "Cognitive Functioning in chronic fatigue syndrome" in 1995, and a PhD, entitled "Expressed emotion and Type 1 diabetes" in 2000. My current research interests centre around understanding and managing chronic illness, particularly chronic fatigue syndrome, focusing on the roles of illness cognitions and interpersonal factors.