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Cancer-related fatigue is one of the most common and debilitating side effects of cancer and its treatment. International guidelines therefore recommend that healthcare professionals regularly screen patients for fatigue in everyday clinical practice. However, this has not been done adequately to date, partly because there are different screening tools available whose validity has not yet been sufficiently investigated scientifically.

This is precisely what the MERLIN study with 338 patients with different types of cancer has now done: In a comparative analysis, three different screening instruments were tested for their consistency with established, more detailed fatigue questionnaires. The results, which have now been published, show that the instruments varied in their ability to reliably distinguish between patients with and without fatigue in the first weeks of cancer treatment.

Of the three screening instruments, the Impact Scale, which assesses the impact of fatigue on a scale of 0 to 10, provided the most accurate indication of the actual presence of fatigue. The instrument is easy to use and could therefore establish itself as a particularly suitable screening approach in clinical practice. “Appropriate screening tools can help to identify signs of fatigue more frequently and at an earlier stage, and to treat them more effectively. They should be used widely so that appropriate treatment measures can be offered in good time, which can improve the quality of life of many patients in the long term,” says lead author Patricia Blickle from the Department of Exercise, Cancer Prevention and Survivorship at the German Cancer Research Center (DKFZ), who conducted the MERLIN study together with the Department of Medical Oncology at Heidelberg University Hospital (UKHD) at the NCT Heidelberg. MERLIN is funded by the “Donations Against Cancer” program at the NCT Heidelberg.

Link to the publication: https://doi.org/10.1080/21641846.2025.2521231