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Query: UMLS:C0016053 (fibromyalgia)
 4,687 document(s) hit in 31,850,051 MEDLINE articles (0.00 seconds)

The aim of this work was to study the expression and function of the inhibitory receptor ILT2/CD85j in peripheral blood mononuclear cells (PBMC) from patients with systemic lupus erythematosus (SLE). We studied 23 SLE patients as well as 17 patients with rheumatoid arthritis, 10 with fibromyalgia, and 23 healthy individuals. We found a variable level of expression of ILT2 in the PBMC from both SLE patients and controls, with no significant differences among them. However, when the expression of this receptor was assessed in cell subsets, significantly lower levels were detected in CD19+ lymphocytes from SLE patients compared with healthy controls. Functional assays performed in unfractionated PBMC, showed a significant diminished inhibitory activity of ILT2 in CD4+ and CD8+ cell subsets from SLE patients compared to either rheumatoid arthritis or fibromyalgia patients, and healthy individuals. Our results show that the PBMC from some patients with SLE show a defective expression of ILT2, and that most of them exhibit a poor function of this inhibitory receptor.
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PMID:Analysis of expression and function of the inhibitory receptor ILT2 (CD85j/LILRB1/LIR-1) in peripheral blood mononuclear cells from patients with systemic lupus erythematosus (SLE). 1760 2

Chronic pain is very common in all European countries, with musculoskeletal problems predominating. About 1% of the adult population develops a syndrome of chronic muscle pain, fibromyalgia (FMS), characterized by multiple tender points, back or neck pain, and a number of associated problems from other organs, including a high frequency of fatigue. Evidence points to central sensitization as an important neurophysiological aberration in the development of FMS. Importantly, these neurological changes may result from inadequately treated chronic focal pain problems such as osteoarthritis or myofascial pain. It is important for health professionals to be aware of this syndrome and to diagnose the patients to avoid a steady increase in diagnostic tests. On the other hand, patients with chronic widespread pain have an increased risk of developing malignancies, and new or changed symptoms should be diagnosed even in FMS. In rheumatology practice it is especially important to be aware of the existence of FMS in association with immune inflammatory diseases, most commonly lupus and rheumatoid arthritis. Differential diagnoses are other causes of chronic pain, e.g. thyroid disease. The costs of this syndrome are substantial due to loss of working capability and direct expenses of medication and health-system usage. Fibromyalgia patients need recognition of their pain syndrome if they are to comply with treatment. Lack of empathy and understanding by healthcare professionals often leads to patient frustration and inappropriate illness behavior, often associated with some exaggeration of symptoms in an effort to gain some legitimacy for their problem. FMS is multifaceted, and treatment consists of both medical interventions, with emphasis on agents acting on the central nervous system, and physical exercises.
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PMID:Chronic widespread pain in the spectrum of rheumatological diseases. 1760 90

Patients with widespread pain or fibromyalgia syndrome have many symptoms besides musculoskeletal pain: e.g. fatigue, sleep difficulties, a swollen feeling in tissues, paresthesia, cognitive dysfunction, dizziness, and symptoms of overlapping conditions such as irritable bowel syndrome, headaches and restless legs syndrome. There is evidence for central sensitization in these conditions, but further studies are needed. Anxiety, stress and depression are also present in 30-45% of patients. Other factors that may contribute to symptoms include endocrine dysfunction, psychosocial distress, trauma, and disrupted sleep. Evaluation of a patient presenting with widespread pain includes history and physical examination to diagnose both fibromyalgia and associated or concomitant conditions. Fibromyalgia should be diagnosed by its own characteristic features. Some patients with otherwise typical symptoms of fibromyalgia may have as few as four to six tender points in clinical practice. Patients with rheumatoid arthritis and systemic lupus erythematosus should be evaluated for fibromyalgia, since 20-30% of them have associated fibromyalgia, requiring a different treatment approach.
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PMID:Role of central sensitization in symptoms beyond muscle pain, and the evaluation of a patient with widespread pain. 1760 95

The objectives of the study were to evaluate the prevalence of antinuclear antibodies (ANA) in patients with fibromyalgia (FM) and the probability of the development of clinically overt connective tissue diseases. Four hundred and fifty FM patients were compared to 129 healthy matched blood donors. ANA testing was performed by immunofluorescence on rat tissue sections; in case of highly positive results, ANA were specified further by ELISA and immunodiffusion. All ANA positive FM patients were invited for a control examination. The ANA negative patients received a questionnaire, which was designed to identify those patients with possible connective tissue diseases (CTD). There was no significant difference in the frequency of ANA or thyroid antibodies between patients and controls (11.6% vs. 7%). Two patients had developed SLE: one was already ANA/anti-dsDNA positive at time of first diagnosis of FM; in the other, specific antibodies and SLE-related symptoms developed after 4.5 years. The probability for FM patients to develop CTD (SLE) within one year is 0.0027%, which is comparable to the incidence of SLE in the general population (0.005%). The risk of CTD is not increased in FM. The detection of ANA does not predict the development of CTD. However, in individual cases, FM may be an early sign of an autoimmune disease.
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PMID:Is there a predisposition for the development of autoimmune diseases in patients with fibromyalgia? Retrospective analysis with long term follow-up. 1763

Patient questionnaires are the quantitative tools available to rheumatologists to monitor their patients' health status and responses to therapy. The Health Assessment Questionnaire (HAQ) and its derivatives have been shown to be the most significant predictors of functional and work disability, costs, joint replacement surgery, and mortality; generally at higher levels of significance than joint counts, radiographs, and laboratory tests. Every encounter of a patient with a rheumatologist provides an opportunity to collect data. Yet patient questionnaires, which can be used in all rheumatic diseases, including osteoarthritis, systemic lupus erythematosus, fibromyalgia, scleroderma, and ankylosing spondylitis, are not included in routine care by most rheumatologists. Questionnaires can be adapted to include a simple subjective-objective-assessment-plan (SOAP) clinical encounter note that helps with data entry and also provides all the necessary information for clinical decision making in one sheet of paper. Data that are feasible to collect in clinical care provide the optimal approach to assessing quantitatively how patients are doing. If data are not collected and recorded, that opportunity, on that day, is lost forever. Rheumatologists would find it valuable to adapt questionnaires to the care they provide for all their patients, to document and improve the care they provide, and add quantitative data to standard clinical care.
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PMID:Monitoring outcomes of arthritis and longitudinal data collection in routine care using a patient questionnaire that incorporates a clinical note on one piece of paper. 1767 24

A multidimensional health assessment questionnaire (MDHAQ) is useful in standard care of patients with all rheumatic diseases in a busy clinical setting. The MDHAQ was adapted from the classical health assessment questionnaire (HAQ) for feasibility in standard clinical care, with reduction of the number of activities from 20 to 10, visual analog scales (VAS) as 21 circles rather than 10 cm lines, availability of all core data set patient self-report measures and scoring templates on the front side, and a review of systems symptom checklist and review of recent medical history on the reverse side of a single page. Scoring templates are also available for routine assessment of patient index data (RAPID) scores, based on a composite of the three patient reported outcome (PRO) measures from the core data set included on the HAQ and MDHAQ, physical function pain, and patient estimate of global status. Flow sheets illustrating use of the MDHAQ in standard clinical care of patients with various rheumatic diseases, including psoriatic arthritis, systemic lupus erythematosus, ankylosing spondylitis, gout, scleroderma, vasculitis, fibromyalgia, inflammatory bowel disease arthritis, Behcet's syndrome, and familial Mediterranean fever, are presented to illustrate use of this simple questionnaire to add to clinical decisions and document patient courses and outcomes in standard clinical care of patients with all rheumatic diseases.
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PMID:Can a Multi-Dimensional Health Assessment Questionnaire (MDHAQ) and Routine Assessment of Patient Index Data (RAPID) scores be informative in patients with all rheumatic diseases? 1767 33

Patient assessment in rheumatology is characterized by an important paradox: many extensively-characterized quantitative measures and indices have been developed for rheumatoid arthritis (RA), psoriatic arthritis, systemic lupus erythematosus (SLE), ankylosing spondylitis, vasculitis, osteoarthritis, fibromyalgia, and other rheumatic diseases. However, most regular rheumatology care is guided largely by qualitative clinical impressions, without such measures or indices or any quantitative data other than laboratory tests to assess patient status and/or quality of care. This paradox may be explained in part by regarding the development of measures primarily as clinical research activities, while viewing the application of measurements in regular clinical care as continuous quality improvement (CQI) activities. The development of measures has emphasized validity and reliability, but generally ignored feasibility and acceptability to patients and health professionals, both of which are needed for application in regular clinical care. A summary of the application of clinical measurement in patients with RA over 25 years between 1982 and 2007 at a weekly academic rheumatology clinic conducted by the senior author is presented as 20 often contemporaneous CQI cycles. These cycles include development of a user-friendly modified health assessment questionnaire (MHAQ); assessment of psychological status; monitoring of mortality outcomes; comparisons of joint counts, radiographic scores, and laboratory tests to the MHAQ; a 28-joint count; prospective study of the MHAQ to predict mortality when joint counts, radiographic scores, and laboratory tests are available; development of a multidimensional HAQ (MDHAQ) with complex activities; a fatigue scale; a self-report joint count; scoring templates; a computerized data management system; flow sheets to monitor MDHAQ status; visual analog scales as 21 circles rather than 10 cm lines; composite RAPID3 (rheumatology assessment patient index data) scores for 3 patient measures; and defining RAPID categories for high, moderate and low severity, and near remission. The latter cycles remain under study as ongoing CQI activities.
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PMID:Quantitative measurement of patient status in the regular care of patients with rheumatic diseases over 25 years as a continuous quality improvement activity, rather than traditional research. 1802 10

Arthritis is the leading cause of chronic illness in the United States. Seventy-two percent of the adults aged 55 years and older with arthritis report sleep difficulties. This review discusses sleep disorders associated with rheumatoid arthritis, juvenile rheumatoid arthritis, Sjogren's syndrome, systemic lupus erythematosus, scleroderma, Behcet's disease, seronegative spondyloarthropathies, osteoarthritis, sarcoidosis, and fibromyalgia. We describe the inter-relationship between sleep complaints, disease activity, depression, sleep deprivation, and cytokines. An algorithm for evaluation and treatment of sleep disorders associated with rheumatologic diseases is proposed.
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PMID:Sleep and rheumatologic disorders. 1848 34

Interactions among the immune, nervous and endocrine systems, which are mediated by hormones, neuropeptides, neurotransmitters, cytokines and their receptors, appear to play an important role in modulating host susceptibility and resistance to inflammatory disease. The neuroendocrine system has two main components: the central and the peripheral. The central compartment is located in the locus ceruleus, the brainstem centers of the autonomic system and the paraventricular nucleus; the peripheral mainly consists of the sympathetic/adrenomedullary system, the hypothalamic-pituitary-adrenal axis (HPA), the hypothalamic-pituitary-gonadal (HPG) axis, and the neuroendocrine tissue located in several organs throughout the body. Hormones and neuropeptides may influence the activities of lymphoid organs and cells via endocrine and local autocrine/paracrine pathways or alter the function of different cell types in target organs. Recent studies highlighted alterations of the neuroendocrine system in systemic autoimmune diseases, including rheumatoid arthritis, systemic lupus erythematosus and Sjogren's syndrome (SS). SS, a prototype autoimmune disorder, has a wide clinical spectrum, extending from organ involvement (autoimmune exocrinopathy) to systemic disease and B cell lymphoma. In SS, several functions of the neuroendocrine system are impaired. First, the HPA axis appears to be disturbed, since significantly lower basal ACTH and cortisol levels were found in patients with SS and were associated with a blunted pituitary and adrenal response to ovine corticotropin-releasing factor compared to normal controls. Second, HPG axis is also involved, since lack of estrogens is associated with human disease and the development of autoimmune exocrinopathy in several experimental models. Finally, exocrine glands are enriched with neuroendocrine-related molecules, adjacent to local autoimmune lesions. Certain clinical manifestations of the disease, including the sicca manifestations, easy fatigue, fibromyalgia and psychological disturbances can be very well explained by mechanisms directly related to disturbances of the neuroendocrine axis. On the other hand, the molecular and biochemical effects of the inflammatory molecules or cell-to-cell interaction, observed during the local or systemic autoimmune injury with cells and mediators of the neuroendocrine system, are largely unexplored.
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PMID:Neuroendocrine dysfunction in Sjogren's syndrome. 1866 98

The key feature of fibromyalgia is a chronic pain picture located in different structures of the musculoskeletal system, but without any evidence of disease in them. Besides pain, patients with fibromyalgia often describe tiredness, sleep disorders, headache, and emotional problems, as well as many other psychosomatic complaints. Genetic and environmental factors have been implied in the pathogenesis of fibromyalgia, its perpetuation being explained by an alteration of the nociceptive system, thus leading to a neuroendocrine syndrome of chronic stress. Although research has provided a significant amount of data, there is no definite biomarker for fibromyalgia so far. The disease can appear alone or associated, among other diseases, with rheumatoid arthritis, erythematous systemic lupus, myopathies and multiple sclerosis. Fibromyalgia generally has very important repercussions on family, social and professional life of the patient, especially considering that therapeutics (aerobic exercise, antidepressants and antiepileptic drugs) have hardly shown any effectiveness. However, achieving a precise diagnosis, being able to transmit it to patients in a realistic way, along with attaining an optimally personalized treatment, are of primary importance, among other things, in order to reduce possible iatrogenesis caused from an individual viewpoint in a problem with multiple aspects.
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PMID:[Is fibromyalgia a neurological disease?]. 1892 41


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