Central nervous processing is altered in people with fibromyalgia – results from brain scan study

Fibromyalgia is a chronic condition characterised by widespread pain, sleep problems and cognitive impairment. It is currently unclear how or why it develops and there is no cure.
So a group of experts took 25 people with fibromyalgia (who did not have rheumatic/orthopaedic conditions or psychiatric disorders), 10 people with major depression (but with no pain history) and 35 healthy people of similar ages and gender.

All the volunteers had neurological examinations (using functional near-infrared spectroscopy) and completed questionnaires about pain, depression and fibromyalgia.

Findings
People with fibromyalgia had lower pressure pain thresholds and higher pain intensity than those with major depression and the healthy people.
When the volunteers were subjected to finger pain, brain scans showed people with fibromyalgia had increased activation of the part of the brain associated with voluntary movement, coordination of sensory information, learning and memory, and the expression of individuality, compared to the healthy people.

People with fibromyalgia also displayed a stronger activity over the region of the brain involved in processes such as memory, cognitive flexibility and planning, in comparison to those with major depression.

All three groups performed equally well in a verbal fluency test, but “frontal deficit in cortical activation” was only found in people with depression.

Performance and cortical activation correlated negatively in people with fibromyalgia and positively in those with major depression.

Implications
The study is small, but suggests there are very real differences in key areas of the brains of people with fibromyalgia when compared to those with depression and healthy people.

“Our data give further evidence for altered central nervous processing in patients with fibromyalgia and the distinction between fibromyalgia and major depression,” the research group concludes.

Click here to read the original research.

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Image credit: Birth Into Being