Cited by 350Fibromyalgia and Chronic Fatigue Syndrome ResearchPain Mechanisms and TreatmentsMyofascial pain diagnosis and treatment

Fibromyalgia: an overview

Clauw, Daniel J.·2009·The American Journal of Medicine

Abstract

Fibromyalgia is the diagnosis given to individuals with chronic widespread musculoskeletal pain for which no alternative cause, such as tissue inflammation or damage, can be identified. Fibromyalgia is now believed to be, at least in part, a disorder of central pain processing that produces heightened responses to painful stimuli (hyperalgesia) and painful responses to nonpainful stimuli (allodynia). Aberrations in central pain processing may also be partly responsible for symptoms experienced in several chronic pain disorders that coaggregate with fibromyalgia, which is itself a product of genetic and environmental factors. Thus, aberrational central pain processing is implicated in irritable bowel syndrome, temporomandibular disorder, chronic low back pain, and certain other chronic pain disorders. Fibromyalgia and related disorders appear to reflect deficiencies in serotonergic and noradrenergic, but not opioidergic, transmission in the central nervous system. The heightened state of pain transmission may also be owing to increases in pronociceptive neurotransmitters such as glutamate and substance P. In some cases, psychological and behavioral factors are also in play. Although the overlapping symptomatology between fibromyalgia and related disorders may present diagnostic challenges, proper examination and observation can help clinicians make an accurate diagnosis. In recent years, the vastly improved understanding of the mechanism underlying fibromyalgia and the related spectrum of diseases has fostered rapid advances in the therapy of these chronic pain disorders by both pharmacologic and nonpharmacologic interventions.

Integrity signals

Registry

Crossref · 10.1016/j.amjmed.2009.09.006

Cites

145 of 145 references verified0 citation errors · 0 not checkable

Statistics

Recomputing p-values needs the paper’s full text.

Claims the paper makes

This paper’s full text isn’t openly available, so its claims and self-check weren’t run. The registry and citation checks still apply.

Claims other papers make about this one

Each is checked against this paper’s own text: does it say what the citing paper says it does?

  • The model provides a unifying explanation for the supposed multifactorial origin of the disease, by making a variety of triggering events upstream HPA and HPG axes converge to a common neuroendocrine mechanism.

    “Hence, it provides a unifying explanation for the supposed multifactorial origin of the disease [1], by making a variety of triggering events upstream HPA and HPG axes to converge to a common neuroendocrine mechanism.”
  • There is wide agreement that fibromyalgia syndrome should be considered a central pain sensitization syndrome.

    “Although it is not clear how these physiologic alterations are generated, there is a wide agreement that FMS should be considered as a CPSS [9,10,11,32,33,34].”

Cites

3 retracted

Flagged first, then by citations

2 of the 147 references couldn’t be matched to a known paper.

Cited by

Sorted by citations

Authors
Clauw, D. J.
Affiliations
University of Michigan (US)
Corresponding author
Clauw, Daniel J.
Venue
The American Journal of Medicine
Publisher
Elsevier BV
Published
2009-12
Volume
122
Issue
12
Pages
S3-S13
ISSN
0002-9343 (ISSN-L)
OpenAlex
W2024269125
Cited by
350
References
147
Citations by year
2026: 13 · 2025: 14 · 2024: 13 · 2023: 12 · 2022: 22 · 2021: 29 · 2020: 17 · 2019: 15 · 2018: 13 · 2017: 17 · 2016: 16 · 2015: 18 · 2014: 38 · 2013: 34 · 2012: 39
FWCI
3.16
Type
journal article
Language
en
Open access
closed
Locations
  • The American Journal of Medicine (publishedVersion)
  • PubMed (publishedVersion)
Topics
  • Health Sciences › Medicine › Psychiatry and Mental health › Fibromyalgia and Chronic Fatigue Syndrome Research
  • Health Sciences › Medicine › Physiology › Pain Mechanisms and Treatments
  • Life Sciences › Biochemistry, Genetics and Molecular Biology › Cell Biology › Myofascial pain diagnosis and treatment
Keywords
fibromyalgia, central sensitization, hyperalgesia, allodynia, chronic widespread pain, irritable bowel syndrome, temporomandibular disorders, chronic low back pain, serotonergic neurotransmission, noradrenergic neurotransmission, glutamate, substance P, psychosocial factors, fibromyalgia diagnosis, fibromyalgia treatment
MeSH terms
Analgesics, Antidepressive Agents, Brain, Fibromyalgia, Humans, Magnetic Resonance Imaging, Neurosecretory Systems, Pain, Sleep Wake Disorders, Stress, Physiological, Tomography, Emission-Computed, Single-Photon

About these checks

Registry, retraction, Cites and statistics results are computed, not judged, with one exception: a printed reference that no index lists is read once by a model before it counts as a citation error. Claims are extracted by a model and kept only when their quote appears verbatim in the text; each cited source is then checked, with a model’s help, for whether it says what the claim relies on. Those verdicts can be wrong — read the claim’s quote and the cited source before relying on one.

Statistics and arithmetic are recomputed, not judged.

Confidence bands are shown only for fields calibrated on our annotated test set. None is calibrated yet, so no band is shown.

What counts as a claim ›How we measure confidence ›How we check this ›

Are you an author, or do you see a problem with this page? Request a review