Thursday, December 1, 2011

ACR2011 and Fibromyalgia (5)

Quite a lot of posters on fibromyalgia! I’ve taken a couple of abstracts as a couple of things might be new to one or another. It’s a very private selection. I won’t advocate some of the wonderdrugs, the pharma industry is eager to promote.


Functional MRI (fMRI) in Patients with Cognitive Dysfunction Related to Fibromyalgia (Fibrofog).

Robert S. Katz and colleagues presented a study with the eye catcher fibro fog in the study’s title. Fibromyalgia patients complain often about cognitive problems, nicknamed fibro fog, and perform poorly on neuropsychological tests. The present pilot study examined fMRI activation during an analog of the auditory consonant trigram (ACT) task in two patients with fibromyalgia (FIBRO) and two patients with rheumatoid arthritis. The authors found that FIBRO patients demonstrate similar activation patterns to RA patients during ACT recognition. In a more difficult distraction task the FIBRO activation pattern of the FIBRO patients differed from that in the RA patients.
As this is a pilot study, tests on more patients are needed to get more insights into the underlying neural substrates as somatic findings will help to overcome the myth, fibromyalgia pain isn’t real but only imagined pain. I don’t know who came up with this unfounded hypothesis, but you find people clinging to this concept in the real world. “Because you have seen me, you have believed; blessed are those who have not seen and yet have believed.” John 20,20. My idea of treating patients is to believe in the pain that somebody, but this might be a bit too idealistic.


[MON] 943
Functional MRI (fMRI) in Patients with Cognitive Dysfunction Related to Fibromyalgia (Fibrofog).
Robert S. Katz1, Vy T. Dinh1, Glen Stebbins2 and Frank Leavitt1.
1Rush University Medical Center, Chicago, IL, 2Rush University Medical Center, Chicago
Conclusion: Behavioral differences in ACT performance has been noted in patients with FIBRO, but the underlying neural substrates involved in this deficit performance has not been explored. In this pilot study, we found that FIBRO patients demonstrate similar activation patterns to RA patients during ACT recognition following a non-demanding distraction task (blank screen). However, when the distraction task was difficult (color-name distraction), the FIBRO activation pattern of the FIBRO patients differed from that seen in the RA patients during recognition. These pilot data may provide insights into the underlying neural substrates supporting ACT performance and behavioral differences observed in FIBRO patients.

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