Gene/Protein Disease Symptom Drug Enzyme Compound
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Query: UMLS:C0015672 (fatigue)
 51,768 document(s) hit in 31,850,051 MEDLINE articles (0.00 seconds)

Fibromyalgia syndrome (FMS) is a more common a condition than previously estimated. The most recent estimates are that 3 to 6 million patients have been diagnosed with FMS. The ACR criteria, established in 1990, provide the primary care provider with definitive subjective and objective findings that have shown to be 88% accurate in their ability to diagnose patients with the syndrome. There is no cure for FMS. It is a chronic condition, but patients quality of life can be improved when fatigue and pain are reduced. The institution of a plan that is developed collaboratively by the patient and the provider is the essence of successful symptom management. The hallmarks of the management plan include: improving the quality of sleep through the judicious use of medications that boost the body's level of serotonin (therefore reducing fatigue), and reducing pain through complimentary modalities such as exercise, physical therapy, relaxation techniques, massage, and biofeedback.
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PMID:Fibromyalgia syndrome. 976 57

A 43-year-old woman presented at the age of 38 with joint pains and muscle stiffness. Tender points were found fulfilling ACR criteria (1) for fibromyalgia. She had well developed muscles and decreasing muscle power since the age of 35. Muscle pains increased after exercise. Her 10-year-old son had similar symptoms and one paralytic attack. Muscle pain and fatigue increasing with age were found by history in three close relatives. Forearm cold water test produced myotonia in both mother and son. Electromyography was normal and muscle biopsy showed minor unspecific changes. Biochemical investigation of muscle mitochondrial function was normal. Peroral potassium load test produced complete muscle paralysis at a potassium serum level of 5.0 mmol/l. Autosomal dominant hyperkalemic periodic paralysis was diagnosed. Frequent carbohydrate enriched meals, peroral bendroflumethiazide and restriction to submaximal exercise improved muscle and joint pain. Salbutamol peroral spray relieved the periodic weakness.
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PMID:Fibromyalgia in hyperkalemic periodic paralysis. 980 5

Just as our caveman forebears were frail in the face of predatory animals, we are frail in today's society of childhood neglect or abuse, bumper-to-bumper traffic, frustration at work, and multiple daily hassles. The same neuroendocrine systems and pain regulatory mechanisms that protected early man during acute stress are still encoded in our genome, but may be maladaptive in psychologically and physiologically vulnerable people faced with chronic stress. Many patients with fibromyalgia become vulnerable because of the long-lasting psychological and neurophysiological effects of negative experiences in childhood. Ill-equipped with positive cognitive, emotional, and behavioral skills as adults, they display maladaptive coping strategies, low self-efficacy, and negative mood when confronted with the inevitable stressors of life. Psychological distress ensues, which reduces thresholds for pain perception and tolerance (already relatively low in women) even further. Converging lines of psychological and neurobiological evidence strongly suggest that chronic stress-related blunting of the HPA, sympathetic, and other axes of the stress response together with associated alterations in pain regulatory mechanisms may finally explain the pain and fatigue of fibromyalgia. Vulnerable people who can be classified by the ACR criteria as having fibromyalgia do not have a discrete disease. They are simply the most ill in a continuum of distress, chronic pain, and painful tender points in the general population.
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PMID:Pain in fibromyalgia. 1008 59

We have encounted two patients with fibromyalgia (FM) initially diagnosed as having autoimmune fatigue syndrome (AIFS). To investigate the relationship between AIFS and FM, the distribution of the tender points in patients with AIFS was assessed according to the ACR criteria for FM. It was revealed that AIFS patients had 5.6 tender points on averages. Patients with headaches, digestive problems, or difficulty going to school had more tender points than patients without. Patients with ANA titers < 1: 160 had more tender points than patients with ANA > or = 1: 160. Anti-Sa negative patients had more tender points than positive patients. These results suggest a relationship between AIFS and FM in terms of the pathophysiologic mechanisms of the numerous tender points. In other words, ANA-positive FM patients could be one form of AIFS, as well as ANA-positive chronic fatigue syndrome patients. Thus, autoimmunity could explain the controversial disease entities of FM and/or CFS.
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PMID:[Autoimmune fatigue syndrome and fibromyalgia syndrome]. 1046 39

Data related to the disease course of patients with systemic lupus erythematosus (SLE) with special attention to the persistence of disease activity in the long term are scarce. At this moment reliable figures are only known about the survival rate as a measure of outcome. The aim of this multicenter study was to describe the outcome of SLE patients with a disease duration of greater than 10 y. Outcome parameters were two disease activity-scoring systems (SLEDAI and ECLAM), the end organ damage (SLICC/ACR damage index) and treatment. Our results are derived from 187 SLE patients followed at 10 different centres in Europe over a period of 1 y. Serious clinical signs or exacerbations, defined by the occurrence or detoriation of already existing symptoms of renal and cerebral nervous systems were observed in 2-11% of the patients, seizures and psychosis in 3%, proteinuria in 11% and an increase in serum creatinine in 5% of the patients. No change took place in the overall damage index. Yet, the disease course in most patients was characterized by periods of tiredness (42-60%), arthritis (20-25%), skin involvement such as malar rash (32-40%), migraine (15-20%), anaemia (15%) and leucopenia (17-19%). Summarizing these results it is shown that patients, still under care after such a long time of having this disease, do have a disease that is far from extinguished.
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PMID:Systemic lupus erythematosus. Disease outcome in patients with a disease duration of at least 10 years: second evaluation. 1124 10

To determine in clinical practice which rheumatoid arthritis (RA) clinical status variables are most associated with a change in disease modifying antirheumatic drug (DMARD) therapy, we studied 26,240 observations from 1905 RA patients occurring over 25 years. Variables included tender joint count, erythrocyte sedimentation rate (ESR), grip strength, visual analog scale for pain, global severity, fatigue and sleep, Health Assessment Question functional disability scale (HAQ), anxiety, depression and morning stiffness. Only the tender joint count required a physician. Observations at which a change in DMARD therapy occurred were compared to those where a change did not occur using generalized estimating equations (GEE) and classification and regression tree analysis (CART). Tender joint count, pain, global severity, and ESR were the 4 variables most strongly predictive of DMARD change. CART modeling indicated a special role for fatigue and sleep disturbance in some patients. These data add support in clinical practice for the ACR core set and the DAS set of variables. In addition, they validate the use of these variables in a practice setting. We suggest a minimum set of evaluations comprising: joint count, ESR or CRP, measures of pain and/or severity, a fatigue scale (fatigue being a surrogate for sleep disturbance), and a measure of function such as the HAQ or modified HAQ. Because only joint count requires physician participation, these evaluations are practical for the clinic, and allow quantitative measurement of RA status. With the use of quantile charts, the comparative status of RA and the change in RA status can be determined easily.
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PMID:Evaluation and documentation of rheumatoid arthritis disease status in the clinic: which variables best predict change in therapy. 1146 86

In total, 189 consecutive women diagnosed with SLE were evaluated using the ACR 1990 criteria for fibromyalgia. Patients were classified into three subgroups. The fibromyalgia group (FM) included patients experiencing pain on palpation in at least 11 of the 18 tender points examined, as well as having a history of widespread pain for at least three months. Patients who were noted to have pain in fewer than four quadrants with less than 11 of 18 tender points were considered to have regional pain (RP). All patients who did not meet criteria for either FM or RP were classified as having no pain (NP). Measurement of SLE disease activity, sleep complaints, depression, fatigue severity and health status were performed. Only 18 of the SLE patients (9.5%) (95% CI 5.3-14%) fulfilled the ACR criteria for the classification of FM. Of the patients, 106 (56.1%) fulfilled criteria for RP and had a number of tender points of 5.4 +/- 3.4, and the rest of the patients (34.4%) had no tenderness at specific tender point sites. Age, body mass index, educational level and disease duration were comparable between the groups. FM and RP groups had different patterns of symptoms prevalence, with dysmenorrhea being more distinctive for FM. Sleep disturbances were more severe in the FM than in the RP group. Daytime complaints such as sleepiness, fatigue and depression were similar for RP and FM groups, but patients with FM reported more disability. Fibromyalgia is not common in Mexican patients with SLE and has a different pattern of symptoms in RP and NP patients. These data add evidence that ethnicity can play an important role in FM manifestations.
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PMID:Prevalence and factors associated with fibromyalgia in Mexican patients with systemic lupus erythematosus. 1487 Sep 11

Designing successful randomized controlled trials (RCTs) in systemic lupus erythematosus (SLE) poses many challenges. It remains difficult to correlate alterations in biologic markers with clinical outcome, especially when signs and symptoms are intermittent and broadly variable between patients. Disease activity indices were not designed specifically as outcome measures in RCTs, as they were developed in the context of longitudinal observational studies. Although all disease activity indices have been validated against each other and demonstrated to show change, organ system manifestations are variably weighted; fatigue and autoantibody titers are scored in some and not in others. Due to the variability of the underlying disease course an assessment of disease activity may most accurately be portrayed as change over time, such as an area under the curve analysis. Another lesson learned is that 'responder indices' proposed in the absence of prospective validation in RCTs do not function well. The argument can always be made that any response criteria will work if the treatment is effective; but without the precedent of a product specifically approved for use in SLE, this is hard to prove. The ACR/Systemic Lupus International Cooperating Clinics (SLICC) damage index was designed to score irreversible manifestations of disease or consequences of its treatment, provided they had been present for at least six months. The damage index may best be utilized to stratify patients or balance randomization at baseline. It may also be incorporated into an endpoint analysis, to ensure that treatment or disease associated deterioration in organ system function (that may be overlooked in scoring disease activity alone) has not occurred. Patient cohort data have demonstrated that the medical outcomes survey short form-36 (SF-36) reflected the effects of SLE better than other patient reported measures. Worsening SF-36 domain scores best correlate with higher disease activity, increased glucocorticoid doses and use of cytotoxic agents. It has been shown sensitive to change in RCTs and observational cohorts, and reflects the impact of treatment with high dose glucocorticoids and immunosuppressive agents, as well as end stage renal disease. There is now a body of data derived from RCTs in SLE. Albeit limited, yet to result in an approved therapy, evidence is accumulating that indicate 'early markers' of response can be defined which may correlate with longer term clinical outcomes. This should inform us in our ongoing efforts to clinically test a broad variety of promising interventions.
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PMID:Clinical trial design in systemic lupus erythematosus: lessons learned and future directions. 1523 Mar

In this short review, four different aspects of SLE are discussed. The ACR criteria for SLE were established for the differentiation of SLE from other autoimmune diseases and not for the direct diagnosis of SLE. Treatment of SLE is continuously re-evaluated thanks ongoing clinical research. Best clinical practice should be based on experienced and continuous knowledge in the field rather than on dogmatic treatment schemes. SLE is not one disease, but a series of clinical pictures associated into a syndrome. Finally, do not forget that patients with the SLE syndrome suffer almost always from debilitating fatigue.
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PMID:[Systemic lupus erythematosus--myths and dogma]. 1594 19

The aim of this exploratory study was to systematically assess the potential effectiveness and tolerability of quetiapine, an atypical antipsychotic, for the treatment of patients with fibromyalgia. This was a unicentre, open-label study conducted in thirty-five outpatients, 18 years or older, who met the ACR criteria for fibromyalgia and who had not satisfactorily responded to their previous fibromyalgia treatment. Quetiapine, flexibly dosed (25-100 mg/day), was added to their original treatment regimen for 12 weeks. The primary outcome measure was the mean change from baseline to endpoint in the Fibromyalgia Impact Questionnaire (FIQ) total score. Secondary efficacy measures included mean changes from baseline to endpoint in the scores of the Clinical Global Impression (CGI) of Severity scale, Pittsburgh Sleep Quality Index (PSQI), Beck Depression Inventory (BDI), State-Trait Anxiety Inventory (STAI), 12-Item Short Form Health Survey (SF-12), and individual items of the FIQ. Thirty (85.7%) patients (mean age 47+/-7.9, 93.3% females) had a postbaseline evaluation and constituted the intent-to-treat efficacy sample. Mean FIQ total score decreased significantly by 10.2 points from a baseline of 63.2 to 53.0 at study endpoint (p<0.001). A statistically significant reduction was observed in FIQ stiffness and FIQ fatigue subscores but not in FIQ pain subscore. Large effect sizes were observed for the FIQ total (1.04), CGI-severity (1.00) and PSQI (1.07), while moderate effect sizes (i.e.> or =0.50) were encountered in the FIQ fatigue, FIQ stiffness and SF-12 mental component summary. Quetiapine was safely administered and well tolerated. Despite the lack of effect on pain, the significant and relevant improvement in overall efficacy measures and quality of life suggests that quetiapine may be a valuable drug for treatment of patients with fibromyalgia that should be further tested in double-blind, placebo-controlled trials.
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PMID:An open-label study of quetiapine in the treatment of fibromyalgia. 1688 82


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