At Biosalud, we have long been dealing with the fibromyalgia. And we try to keep abreast of new scientific discoveries about it. In this regard, we echo a great article by Erich Lederer in which he explores the causes and current recommendations on this disease.

One in thirty fibromyalgia patients in Germany has chronic pain, consisting of constant pain in all parts of the body and sometimes associated depression. Fibromyalgia is often attributed to psychological causes, but recent studies indicate that a nervous disorder may be behind the disease.

What happens in the body of a person with fibromyalgia

Publications from Würzburg and Boston have detailed what happens in the body of a person with fibromyalgia.

According to Marco Loggia of Harvard Medical School, intense sensations of pain may be caused by an alteration in the brain's reward system. Fibromyalgia patients have weaker nerve impulses to pain, This would also explain why the effect of analgesics and opiates on them is less.

Nurcan Uceyler and his co-workers at the University of Würzburg have discovered that the number of small nerve fibres in the fibromyalgia patients was smalleralthough it is also not proven that this is due to the disease or is simply a symptom of another process.

In addition, there are also findings that suggest that the disease may be due to an inflammatory process, as genetic variants linked to the inflammatory process have been discovered. cytokines inflammatory diseases.

New recommendations for fibromyalgia treatment

Currently the tendency is to describe the patient's pain with a complete questionnaire, in order to locate the areas of pain, but also to detect other anomalies in these patients, such as alterations in the quality of sleep or certain cognitive disorders.

Specialists in rheumatology and pain medicine prescribe physical and psychosocial activity to treat the depression associated with the disease, but for more severe cases a multimodal therapy based on medication as well as consistent behaviour has to be applied. There is also benefit from techniques such as acupuncture.

Are the treatments applied still wrong for economic reasons?

Many doctors use anti-inflammatory drugs such as ibuprofen or naproxen for fibromyalgia patients, or psychotropic drugs, using standards that do not correspond with current guidelines, according to which fibromyalgia is not a psychological disorder but a somatic disorder.Dr. Ursula Marschall, head of the Health Competence Centre at Barmer GEK, understands that the wrong therapies are often economically motivated, in addition to the patients' desire to be pain-free.

These scientific discoveries should be the starting point to discard the idea that fibromyalgia is a psychological disease and to fight its causes in a direct way.