Brain scans reveal that people with fibromyalgia are not as able to prepare for pain as healthy people, and they are less likely to respond to the promise of pain relief. This altered brain processing could explain why people with the mysterious chronic ailment feel pain more intensely and don't respond as well to narcotic painkillers, the researchers said. Their findings are published in the Nov. 5 issue of the journal Arthritis & Rheumatism.
People without fibromyalgia can mentally alleviate some types of pain that people experience, explained Dr. Lynn Webster, president of the American Academy of Pain Medicine. "For people with fibromyalgia, that capability seems to be dampened if not eliminated," Webster said. "They may not be able to respond the same way to medications or our intrinsic [natural] mechanisms for dealing with pain."
The authors used an MRI to scan each participant's brain as a blood pressure cuff painfully
squeezed the patient's calf, said study author Dr. Marco Loggia, from Massachusetts General Hospital and Harvard Medical School in Boston. Doctors tailored the pressure provided by the cuff so that everyone with or without fibromyalgia would rate their pain between 40 to 50 on a scale of 100. As expected, the people with fibromyalgia needed much less pressure to reach the same pain rating as a healthy person, Loggia said.
No one knows what causes fibromyalgia, which involves widespread joint and muscle pain. The disorder affects 3.4 percent of women and 0.5 percent of men in the United States, according to the study. Older women are most likely to suffer from fibromyalgia, which affects more than 7 percent of women aged 60 to 79. (Health Day News)
Source: Physicians News Digest November 2013
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