A detailed guide to understanding Fibromyalgia symptoms, early warning signs, and how they are diagnosed.
When you wake up in a fibromyalgia flare—with that feeling that you can’t move, as if a 500-pound weight has been dropped on you in your sleep—you can’t help but wonder how you can possibly face the day. On mornings like this, the best thing you can do is limit your activity and rest. Still, even as your body takes the downtime it needs, feelings of guilt or other negative emotions can make days like…
I am printing this study because it is pretty basic to the understanding of fibromyalgia. We feel pain when there shouldn’t be a pain. It is interesting, in particular, to look at the areas of the brain that are activated when we do though. Fibromyalgia is a chronic syndrome defined by widespread muscle pain, fatigue, sleep dysfunction, and cognitive dysfunction. Fibromyalgia pain dysfunction involves increased sensitivity to pain known as hyperalgesia. A recent study published…
When we are talking about the poor cognitive function we have to be precise and not confuse it with just being absentminded but studies have shown there are real cognitive dysfunctions occurring with fibromyalgia. What is the cause of the cognitive dysfunction seen in the syndrome though? Is the brain aging faster? Is it due to depression or anxiety? Or is it correlated to pain or lack of sleep? There are many areas where people with fibromyalgia can point…
Anyone who lives with fibromyalgia has struggled to try to explain the chronic pain and fatigue they experience to their friends and loved ones, and even to strangers. Explaining fibromyalgia is no easy task. Sometimes just putting into words what you feel is difficult enough, as fibromyalgia often takes your words away. But, even when you can find the words, trying to explain something so foreign and seemingly abstract to someone who has never (and…
Fibromyalgia comes with three major types of pain sensations. Hyperalgesia: this is our major pain as part of the syndrome itself. It is an abnormal sensitivity to pain. The crux of our pain dysfunction. Allodynia: With allodynia, there is a triggered pain response from stimuli that do not normally cause pain. In this case, it causes a great deal of skin pain. The skin burns to the touch and is often described as a sunburn sensation…
I am in a Fibro Flare. The pain arching through me right now is difficult to describe, to be honest. It is a deep, bone-deep, throbbing ache that is at around an 8 on the pain scale. It is extremely distracting. It is gnawing. Grating. And that is when I am not moving. Moving is another story altogether. In this particular case, it is from weather changes. We have been having hot weather and flash…
New research indicates that a disruption of brain signals for reward and punishment contributes to increased pain sensitivity, known as hyperalgesia, in fibromyalgia patients. Results published in Arthritis & Rheumatism, a journal of the American College of Rheumatology, suggest that this altered brain processing might contribute to widespread pain and lack of response to opioid therapy in patients with fibromyalgia. Fibromyalgia is a chronic, musculoskeletal syndrome characterized by widespread joint and muscle pain along with…
We are all familiar with fibrofog when it comes to fibromyalgia but fibrofog is really just part of the symptoms associated with the cognitive dysfunction of FM. An article published online on July 21 in Arthritis Care and Research has recently looked more in-depth into the symptoms of cognitive dysfunction and where it affects FM. What they looked at were four components of Executive Function: Click Here to Visit the Store and find Much More….…
Fibromyalgia is a chronic syndrome defined by widespread muscle pain, fatigue, sleep dysfunction, and cognitive dysfunction. Fibromyalgia pain dysfunction involves increased sensitivity to pain known as hyperalgesia. People with Fibromyalgia can experience what is referred to as ‘flares’ where their symptoms get more severe. The flare study A survey in Pain Medicine recently looked into the nature of flares to ask people with Fibromyalgia the nature of these flares. They asked open-ended questions to determine…
Brain fog is a symptom of many chronic illnesses and chronic pain. Just seems that when we get ill and our bodies get fatigued or are fighting pain, or both, add in some lack of sleep… you get brain fog. Symptoms include: I listed some of them there but really there can be more. For example, transposing numbers is also transposing letters so we can spell words wrong frequently. As well as of course forgetting…