Fibromyalgia is a multisystem disease characterized by various and diffuse symptoms including sleep disturbance, fatigue, headache, dizziness, reduction in short term memory, hypersensitivity to environmental stimuli, morning stiffness, irritable bowel and irritable bladder, numbness and tingling, premenstrual syndrome, restless leg syndrome, temporomandibular joint pain, noncardiac chest pain, Raynaud’s phenomenon, sicca syndrome, and anxiety.
Prevalence in the United States is 3.4% in women and 0.5% in men, with increasing prevalence to age 80 years and women being affected 10 times more frequently than men and familial clustering suggesting a genetic etiology.
It is chronic and, because the symptoms do not follow strict anatomic pathways, is often misdiagnosed and poorly treated.
Functional MRI studies have demonstrated that the brains of patients with fibromyalgia react differently to pain stimuli than the brains of patients without fibromyalgia. Thus, the problem appears to be that the brains of fibromyalgia patients have different functional, electrical, and chemical differences than the brains of people without the disorder. In other words, patients with fibromyalgia handle brain inputs and outputs of different stimuli in an abnormal fashion.
Triggers for symptoms include emotional stress, illness, surgery, and trauma.
Criteria for diagnosis of fibromyalgia were formulated by the American College of Rheumatology (ACR) in 1990. ACR […]

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