Raising Awareness of Fibromyalgia in Men

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Our page for interesting snippets of information found whilst trawling the net - mostly related to fibromyalgia.

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See How Medical Marijuana Can Help with Chronic Pain Conditions. (FibroMen Guest Post by Jason Duke)

Four Daily Things it's Difficult to do when you have Fibromyalgia.

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Excerpt From - Fibromyalgia: an interview with Dr Frederick Wolfe, University of Kansas School of Medicine

Who does fibromyalgia affect?

It depends. In clinical practice it has generally been an illness in which 90% of the people who are diagnosed with it were women.
In 2010 we changed the diagnostic criteria somewhat to eliminate one of the factors that might have led to this female predominance. That factor was pain on pressure. When the examining physicians would touch people in certain areas, women would tend to complain of pain more than men. This probably was related to a couple of things. One of which was related to the body habitus – women were generally smaller than men and less muscular.
Also human and animal studies have shown females have a decreased threshold for pain compared to males.
The change in criteria that occurred in 2010 eliminated this criterion. The consequence has been that studies that are beginning to be done tend to show that the prevalence of the disorder may be approaching 50% - that is to say the prevalence may be quite similar in women and men.
In the study that we just did there was only a very slight predominance of women.

Your recent research found that the prevalence of fibromyalgia in the general German population in 2012 was 2.4% and 1.8% in women and men respectively. Is this difference statistically significant?

Statistical significance is often a function of the size of the sample. So if instead of examining slightly more than 2,000 patients we examined more than 4,000 patients, that difference would have been statistically significant.
I think one can overplay the statistical significance in a study like this. That is why we tend to report things with confidence intervals which is another measure of how certain we are about the level we observe.
I would say that the prevalence is around 50:50 but it is probably more in women. I say that because other studies that have been done using survey methods have found a female predominance – but only a very slight predominance.
That is not entirely clear because what one sees in a population study might not be the same as what one sees in the clinic. Women tend to go to physicians more than men and so they’re more likely to be diagnosed than men.
In societal terms it may be more acceptable to have certain diagnoses if you are a woman rather than a man and vice versa depending on the situation.
So we have to be careful in extrapolating the results of this study to the clinic. In clinical studies of fibromyalgia, it has often been 90% women. Maybe the change in criteria will result in a change in diagnosis in the clinic but that remains to be seen.

How prevalent is fibromyalgia?

It is about 2%. Some countries will have slightly higher or lower percentages, but in general they will be around 1-5%. This is a high or low prevalence depending on perspective.

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