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Reviewed By: Laura Martin,
SOURCES: 2006 Medical Reference from Medstar Television. American College of Rheumatology, Arthritis Foundation, National Fibromyalgia Association and National Institute of Arthritis and Musculoskeletal and Skin Disease
© 1999-2011 Medstar Television
For ten years, Sarah Wilson has lived with the daily muscle pain of fibromyalgia.
If it's um, really intense, it feels like a burning pain, burning, pulling, stretching.
She's in a study at the University of Alabama at Birmingham to test how emotional stress affects perceptions of pain.
None of us really think about what's the difference between the intensity of what I experience and the unpleasantness of what I experience. But in the laboratory we can ask people to differentiate between these two dimensions of pain.
Patients and healthy volunteers think about a stressful or non-stressful experience. Then, mild to moderate heat is applied to their arm.
At that five second peak, when it was at its highest temperature, how intense did that feel to you?
Sarah rates 'what' she feels and 'how' she feels on a sliding scale.
Going from no pain sensation at all, all the way over to the most intense pain sensation imaginable.
Early results show both groups rate the pain the same, but people with fibromyalgia find it much more unpleasant. The study also looks at physical responses.
We can see changes in cerebral or brain blood flow that actually corresponds very nicely with the changes in patient's reports of the unpleasantness of their pain experiences.
Understanding these changes could lead to better treatments. For WebMD, I'm Damon Meharg.
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