Fibromyalgia Detection Based on EEG Connectivity Patterns

Abstract

Objective: The identification of a complementary test to confirm the diagnosis of FM. The diagnosis of fibromyalgia (FM) is based on clinical features, but there is still no consensus, so patients and clinicians might benefit from such a test. Recent findings showed that pain lies in neuronal bases (pain matrices) and, in the long term, chronic pain modifies the activity and dynamics of brain structures. Our hypothesis is that patients with FM present lower levels of brain activity and therefore less connectivity than controls. Methods: We registered the resting state EEG of 23 patients with FM and compared them with 23 control subjects’ resting state recordings from the PhysioBank database. We measured frequency, amplitude, and functional connectivity, and conducted source localization (sLORETA). ROC analysis was performed on the resulting data. Results: We found significant differences in brain bioelectrical activity at rest in all analyzed bands between patients and controls, except for Delta. Subsequent source analysis provided connectivity values that depicted a distinct profile, with high discriminative capacity (between 91.3–100%) between the two groups. Conclusions: Patients with FM show a distinct neurophysiological pattern that fits with the clinical features of the disease.

Fibromyalgia: one year in review 2022

“…There is no lack of attempts to diagnose FM with the aid of biomarkers and biological fluid analyses. In line with the findings concerning the importance of a history of trauma and stress-related (20).…”

Electroencephalography functional connectivity—A biomarker for painful polyneuropathy

“…It is noted that most of the connectivity pairs represent local short-distance functional connections, mainly within the posterior (centro-parietal) 'sensing' brain regions and frontal (including the mid-frontal) 'controlling' brain regions. Our findings on the increased frontal theta/alpha connectivity in chronic neuropathic pain patients align with those of chronic low back pain patients [17] and fibromyalgia [34,35]. Furthermore, similar to the connectivity patterns in our study, these studies emphasized the predominance of shortdistance association U-fibres at theta and alpha frequencies indicating the importance of 'cross-talk' between neighbour brain areas in the expression and regulation of pain.…”

Resting-state electroencephalography and magnetoencephalography as biomarkers of chronic pain: a systematic review

“…Finally, 76 studies were included. 1,[5][6][7][8]10,11,15,16,[18][19][20][21][22][23][24][25][26][27][30][31][32][33]35,[37][38][39][40][41][42][43][44][45][46][47][48][49]51,56,59,60,63,[66][67][68][69][74][75][76]79,80,82,[89]…”