Fibromyalgia is the Most Common Cause of Chronic Widespread Pain in the United States
Fibromyalgia is a chronic disorder characterized by muscular or musculoskeletal pain with stiffness and localized tenderness at specific points on the body. Fibromyalgia amplifies painful sensations by affecting the way your brain processes pain signals.
Fibromyalgia is the most common cause of chronic extensive pain around the world, especially in the United States and it excessively affects women as compared to men. The Disease Control and Prevention Centers in the U.S. estimates that about 2 percent of the population among which 4 million adults—have fibromyalgia. Other organizations approximate even higher numbers.
According to previous research, approximately three in four people with fibromyalgia have not received an accurate diagnosis, and those who are aware that they have fibromyalgia spend a lot of time even years between symptom inception and diagnosis.
Common symptoms include pain and stiffness all over the body, fatigue, depression, fretfulness, sleep problems, headaches, and problems with thinking, memory, and concentration.
Lab tests often appear representative in patients with fibromyalgia. Experts estimate about 75 percent of fibromyalgia cases are left undiagnosed mean while others live with pain for years and years, often receiving treatments that are unproductive or even can be harmful to the patient. Doctors always depend on patients’ symptoms, which result from their physical and objective examination and the exclusion of other diseases to come to a fibromyalgia diagnosis focusing on specific tender points. Can fibromyalgia be cured through a blood test? There’s no blood test, no easy-to-use tool to endow with a quick answer.
But later on, Ohio State University’s College of Medicine conducted new research that has potentially found a new way to detect fibromyalgia with blood tests. The study’s authors caution that more work is needed before a blood test based on their work can be created but they are very optimistic about it.
“The discovery could be an important decisive moment in care of patients with a disease that is frequently misdiagnosed or left undiagnosed, leaving the patients devoid of proper care and guidance on managing their unceasing pain and fatigue”, said Kevin Hackshaw, an associate professor in Ohio State’s College and a rheumatologist at the university’s Wexner Medical Center.
In order to diagnose the cure of fibromyalgia through a blood test, Dr. Hawkshaw said. “We found clear reproducible metabolic patterns in the blood of a number of patients with fibromyalgia; this brings us closer to a blood test than we have ever been.”
Research conducted by Dr. Hackshaw published the results of their work in the Journal of Biological Chemistry. The research examined 50 individuals with fibromyalgia disease, 29 of them with rheumatoid arthritis, 19 people with osteoarthritis, and 23 of them with lupus.
Scientists then looked into the blood samples from every participant, measuring the energy levels of molecules. They found that there were clearly different patterns in the blood of patients suffering from fibromyalgia that made them distinct from those with other disorders.
“Being able to see the biological variations within the blood of these with fibromyalgia patients compared to those with alternative diseases like lupus, osteoarthritis, and rheumatoid arthritis finally give patients justification of their symptoms,” Hackshaw said.
“Not merely, will this be helpful in the direct treatment, however additionally prevents the use of unnecessary medications, that doesn’t ease fibromyalgia pain and can lead to severe addiction.” He further mentioned.
“Like a fingerprint, Each person’s blood is unique, and this test can show us the intricate details of that fingerprint, we can look back into some of these fingerprints and potentially establish a number of the chemicals related to the variations we tend to see,” said Dr.Luis Rodriguez-Saona, author of the study and academic of food science and technology at Ohio State.
Like all chronic conditions, fibromyalgia is not curable and its treatment is often hit and misses with patients being given antidepressants and strong addictive painkillers that somehow benefit them. But fibromyalgia can be identified through various ways like blood tests, the researchers also originate evidence that showed that the metabolic fingerprinting technique has also the potential to find out the rigidity of fibromyalgia in an individual patient. so that if one can not cure the disease, at least one can take precautionary measures to have control over its rigidness.
Source:
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4974061/
https://www.uptodate.com/contents/clinical-manifestations-and-diagnosis-of-fibromyalgia-in-adults