Nearly a million French people suffer from it and often indifferent. World Fibromyalgia Day, which is held on May 12, is a reminder of the existence of this disease.
The 22 nd World Fibromyalgia Day, this Monday, May 12, is an opportunity to remember that many people suffer from this still too little known disease. According to a report from the High Authority for Health (HAS), it affects a woman in 8 to 9 cases out of 10, nearly 90% of patients are under 60 years old and its prevalence is 1.4 to 2.2% of the general population.
Fibromyalgia is a disease that combines pain-like physical symptoms and psychological symptoms. Faced with a complex and heterogeneous clinical picture, doctors do not know how to deal with it or deny its existence. Very often, patients suffer a double penalty: almost permanent suffering and a lack of recognition of their condition.
The symptoms are numerous, fibromyalgia manifesting as permanent muscle or joint pain, chronic fatigue, especially in the morning, trouble sleeping, symptoms of depression or anxiety, and inability to perform a task or exercise due to the pain muscular. Generally speaking, the patient complains of having pain all over without interruption for months.
A misunderstanding and a difficult diagnosis
This disease is therefore not a disease with serious or fatal consequences, but it has very harmful repercussions on the patient’s quality of life, whether social, family or professional. Often feeling misunderstood, people who suffer from it tend to isolate themselves socially and develop severe depression. Patients complain that they are not believed and understood.
If fibromyalgia is suspected, the doctor therefore looks for a set of symptoms that must be present to confirm this diagnosis.
They are in particular a diffuse pain distributed over the whole body and which lasts for more than three months, a pain at the level of the spine, a pain at the pressure of eighteen well-defined points of the body. In order to be able to make a diagnosis of fibromyalgia, eleven or more of these eighteen points must be abnormally sensitive to the pressure of a finger.
Difficult treatment
There is no specific treatment for fibromyalgia. The drugs that are sometimes prescribed are intended to relieve the symptoms without acting on the cause of the disease which remains unknown.
In particular, certain analgesic drugs are offered: most pain medications have no effect in relieving fibromyalgia. Only tramadol sometimes seems to reduce pain, but its side effects limit its use.
Some drugs for depression of the imipramine family are also offered. They provide pain relief in some patients, although their effects seem to wear off after a few months. Antiepileptic drugs such as gabapentin and pregabalin, substances used to treat epilepsy, have shown the most benefit in the treatment of fibromyalgia. Their side effects are nevertheless sometimes difficult to bear in the long term.
Finally, drugs for sleep disorders are sometimes effective. Since lack of restful sleep is a hallmark of fibromyalgia, these drugs can provide relief and improvement of symptoms.
Non-drug methods
Clinical studies have shown that certain non-drug treatments may help people with fibromyalgia. Hypnotherapy and behavioral and cognitive psychotherapies are mentioned. But also music therapy, which consists of relieving acute pain with music.
The HAS also advises the gradual resumption or continuation of physical activity in these patients: at least half an hour of physical activity, adapted, each day. Recalling that the patient must do within his means, but do it anyway, and that exercise deconditioning can generate even more pain. The HAS reminding that the key word of the assumption of responsibility is the activity.
The national association FibromyalgieSOS, created in 2005, helps many patients by getting them out of isolation through the internet. It provides many concrete answers and a number, the 800 220 200, is open 7 days a week from 10 a.m. to 9 p.m., with a permanence run by fibromyalgia volunteers trained in listening.
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