Instrumentos de avaliação da astenia/fadiga em cuidados paliativos: revisão sistemática da literatura

The fact that the assessment symptoms instruments’ standardisation in palliative care ren-ders the communication easier and promotes better health care is commonly agreed.In an attempt to add to that standardisation in Portugal, working together with other colleagues who have the same goals but related to other symptoms and needs, we intended to identify the instruments in palliative care research the most frequently used in the research published over the period from February 2000 to February 2014, within the scope of the study of asthenia/fatigue and verify if those instruments are validated for the Portuguese population. Method: Systematic review of the literature done in 2014, using the electronic databases Pubmed and EBSCO. Results: Selected 49 papers. 19 different instruments identified (5 unidimensional, 10 mul-tidimensional and 4 related to quality of life).Conclusion: The majority of the studies used unidimensional assessment instruments, na-mely the Edmonton Symptom Assessment Scale (ESAS) and the Visual Analogue Scale (VAS) respectively. As for the validation of the identified instruments for Portugal, there is room for improvement.