Depression in paediatric chronic fatigue syndrome (CFS/ME)
Plain English Summary:
Chronic fatigue syndrome (CFS), also known as myalgic encephalomyelitis (ME) affects approximately 1 - 2 teenagers in every 100. It interferes significantly with their day-to-day lives. For example, on average, children and young people with CFS/ME miss one year of school. We think that about 1 in 3 children and young people with CFS/ME also have depression. Those with depression seem to be more disabled, experience more pain, and don't seem to recover as well from CFS/ME.
Aim
My research aims to improve the recognition and treatment of teenagers who have both CFS/ME and depression. It will result in us knowing how to identify depression, who is most at risk of getting depression, and a new treatment approach specifically tailored to help this group of patients to recover.
Plan
This research will:
1)Find out how many teenagers with CFS/ME actually have depression and how best to identify them. I will recruit teenagers with CFS/ME after their first appointment with the specialist paediatric CFS/ME service in Bath. Teenagers with CFS/ME will be interviewed to assess depression, and asked them to fill in two short questionnaires about symptoms of depression. They can choose to be interviewed by Skype or face-to-face, at home or at the hospital. I will analyse how good the questionnaires are at picking up depression in these patients so that we know which questionnaire is best to use.
2)Existing data will be analysed for patterns to see whether particular groups of teenagers with CFS/ME (e.g. boys or girls, older or younger teens) are more likely to have depression than others and to see what impact having depression has on recovery with different treatments (after 6 months).
3)Explore whether there are differences in how teenagers with CFS/ME with depression think, compared to those without depression.
Teenagers in the FITNET-NHS trial, which is testing internet-delivered treatments for CFS/ME, will be asked to fill in two short questionnaires online before they start treatment. One questionnaire looks at the way people think in response to common situations, and the other looks at how they think about their CFS/ME symptoms.
This research will help us to discover: how much of a problem depression is, how to spot depression who is most at risk of depression more about how depression affects recovery from CFS/ME, the particular thinking patterns we should help these teenagers with.