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Stories for Reprint
Fibromyalgia:
Online Survey Reveals Other Symptoms
By Ferdous Al-Faruque, MARRTC Staff
Results from an Internet survey have found that people with fibromyalgia are often affected by other symptoms besides pain and fatigue. Many people with this chronic disease report sensitivity to light, anxiety, and problems with balance and memory.
Almost 500 people with fibromyalgia and 100 people without the disease took part in an online study. The data were collected by the non-profit fibromyalgia advocacy group, Advocates for Fibromyalgia Funding, Treatment, Education and Research or AFFTER, and analyzed by researchers at Chicago's Rush University. The investigators found that people with fibromyalgia were more likely to report 20 of the 49 symptoms that were asked about in the study. People with the disease were more than four times as likely to report sensitivity to light, dizzy spells, problems with balance, night sweats, and vision problems than people without fibromyalgia. Other symptoms that were commonly reported included difficulties with memory, chronic sore throat, sensitivity to medication, hives and skin sensitivity, and trouble swallowing.
Muhammad Yunus, a rheumatologist and professor of medicine at the University of Illinois and co-chair of AFFTER's medical advisory committee, says that based on his research, people with fibromyalgia have extremely sensitive central nervous systems that make them hypersensitive. Sharon Ferbert, founder of AFFTER, says people with fibromyalgia are often made to feel like hypochondriacs and their complaints are dismissed when they describe their symptoms to their healthcare professionals. "Even if there is nothing they can do for all these other symptoms they need to be taken seriously," she says.
Robert Katz, a rheumatologist at Rush University and the principal investigator of the study, says the problem is that fibromyalgia symptoms often look like other diseases, which makes it hard to diagnose. "I think a lot of (fibromyalgia cases) aren't diagnosed because (healthcare professionals) aren't comfortable with making the diagnoses," he says. Since there are no medical tests that can help diagnose fibromyalgia, Katz says healthcare professionals usually look for chronic bodily pain and tenderness as key symptoms when diagnosing a person with the disease. Katz works with fellow rheumatologists to improve the diagnosis of fibromyalgia.
Through their web site www.AFFTER.ORG , Ferbert's organization has collected information from people with fibromyalgia from around the world and is working with researchers from Rush University to find out more about the disease.
This article is the second in a two-part series about online survey research from the Advocates for Fibromyalgia Funding, Treatment Education and Research or AFFTER, and Rush University in Chicago.
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