Reduced brain habituation to somatosensory stimulation in patients with fibromyalgia

Abstract

Objective. To examine brain activity elicited by repetitive nonpainful stimulation in patients with fibromyalgia (FM) and to determine possible psychophysiologic abnormalities in their ability to inhibit irrelevant sensory information.Methods. Fifteen female patients with a diagnosis of FM (ages 30-64 years) and 15 healthy women (ages 39-61 years) participated in 2 sessions, during which electrical activity elicited in the brain by presentation of either tactile or auditory paired stimuli was recorded using an electroencephalogram. Each trial consisted of 2 identical stimuli (S1 and S2) delivered with a randomized interstimulus interval of 550 msec (؎50 msec), which was separated by a fixed intertrain interval of 12 seconds. Event-related potentials (ERPs) elicited by 40 trials were averaged separately for each sensory modality.Results. ERP amplitudes elicited by the somatosensory and auditory S2 stimuli were significantly reduced compared with those elicited by S1 stimuli in the healthy controls. Nevertheless, significant amplitude reductions from S1 stimuli to S2 stimuli were observed in FM patients for the auditory, but not the somatosensory, modality. Conclusion.Our findings suggest that in FM patients, there is abnormal information processing, which may be characterized by a lack of inhibitory control to repetitive nonpainful somatosensory information during stimulus coding and cognitive evaluation.

Aerobic exercise in fibromyalgia: a practical review

“…Associated features include fatigue, poor sleep, anxiety, depression, headache and bowel dysfunction. A recent study showed a lack of inhibitory control in the brain to non-painful repetitive somatosensory stimuli suggesting a mechanism of central sensitization in FM [1]. The American College of Rheumatology (ACR) classiWcation criteria for FM are the most commonly used in clinical and therapeutic research and deWne FM as widespread pain for longer than 3 months duration, with pain on palpation of at least 11 of 18 speciWed tender points on the body [2].…”

The Association of Sensory Responsiveness with Somatic Symptoms and Illness Anxiety

“…First, we did not find an association between altered sensory responsiveness and predominant somatic symptoms whereas most previous studies did [33][34][35][36][37][38]. Contradictory, other studies with subjects diagnosed with somatic symptoms reported that their symptoms were less related to physiological perception than those of controls in rebreathing tasks [58], and patients with severe somatoform symptoms were not more accurate in heartbeat discrimination and mental tracking tasks than controls [59,60].…”

“…Interestingly, patients with predominant illness anxiety do not perform better in detecting their resting heartbeat [31] and are not more sensitive to painful heat stimuli [32], nor to non-painful stimuli [29]. In contrast, subjects diagnosed with predominant somatic symptoms show increased sensitivity to auditory tones [33][34][35], innocuous heat [36,37] and electrical stimulation [38].…”

Impaired pre-attentive auditory processing in fibromyalgia: A mismatch negativity (MMN) study

“…Furthermore, several studies have suggested that accumulated irrelevant stimuli resulting from sensory gating deficits could lead to cognitive dysfunction (Venables, 1964). Patients with FM demonstrate an aberrant sensory gating mechanism (Montoya et al, 2006) and diverse cognitive symptoms (Bertolucci and de Oliveira, 2013). Furthermore, MMNm has been well documented in investigating cognitive processing at the pre-attentive level (Näätänen et al, 2011).…”