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Stories for Reprint
Seeing Through the Fog of Fibromyalgia
By Ferdous Al-Faruque, MARRTC Staff
People with fibromyalgia describe it as a fog-like state that hinders their memory and in turn their ability to complete tasks. They even have a name for it; fibro-fog. Now a new study sheds light on how fibro-fog affects people with fibromyalgia.
Research carried out at the University of Michigan suggests that people with fibromyalgia have the same ability to store information in short-term memory as those without the disease. However, what they've found is that people with the disease tend to have a hard time remembering when they are required to multi-task.
The investigators of the study asked 28 people with fibromyalgia and 14 people without the disease to take memory tests on a computer. Both groups were asked to remember three letters while doing a counting exercise to distract them. What researchers found was that people with fibromyalgia did significantly worse when they were asked to recall the three letters while doing the counting exercise. "What they really have trouble is managing competing information and the short term memory tasks," says Jennifer Glass, a researcher at the University of Michigan. She says this means that people with fibromyalgia have a hard time managing the information in their short-term memory rather than remembering information for a long time.
Glass, who is also the principal investigator of the study, says there are different kinds of verbal memory, such as short-term and long-term. She says information stored in short-term memory is composed of items that you don't expect to remember or need in the long term, such as a phone number you just looked up. Short-term memory also enables us to remember multiple pieces of information when working on several tasks at once.
According to Glass, this research is important in helping people with fibromyalgia find ways to overcome fibro-fog. "I think what you want to do is manage things as best as you can so you are not trying to keep things in your head all the time," she says. Glass suggests that people with fibromyalgia write things down so they don't have to store too much information in their short-term memory. She also suggests they keep planners and digital organizers to help them remember tasks.
Glass's study is part of a body of research that is trying to understand fibromyalgia and find ways to help people with the disease cope with it in their daily lives. "Right now we don't really have any treatments or anything to address this (problem) in patients," she says. Glass adds it's important for health care providers to understand that fibro-fog is a real problem and it can affect people's lives at work and at home.
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