Pressure Point Threshold and ME/CFS comorbidity as Indicators of Physiotherapy Response in Fibromyalgia
Fecha
2020-09Disciplina
MedicinaResumen
Current pharmacological treatments of Fibromyalgia (FM) are merely symptom palliative,
as clinical trials have so far failed to provide overall benefits without associated harms.
Polypharmacy often leads to patient´s health deterioration and chronic drug use to an eventual lack
of patient´s response. Emerging evidence support that physiotherapy treatments based on
mechanical triggers improve FM symptoms and therefore could be used for therapeutic purposes
by themselves, or in combination with current pharmacological treatments, as part of integrative
medicine programs. However, a paucity of studies rigorously and systematically evaluating this
possibility exists. This study uses scores from validated standardized questionnaires, algometer
pressure point threshold (PPT) readings and responses from a custom self-developed questionnaire
to determine the impact of a pressure-controlled manual protocol on FM hyperalgesia/allodynia,
fatigue and patient´s quality of life. The results show that patient´s baseline sensitivity to pain
inversely correlates with treatment response in FM. Moreover, patients presenting comorbid
ME/CFS do not seem to respond to the applied therapy as those presenting FM only. Thus, pretreatment PPTs and ME/CFS comorbidity may serve as indicators to predict patient´s response to
physiotherapy programs based on mechanical triggers, as the one evaluated here. These unexpected
findings grant further explorations including the study of gene expression profiles associating to
patient´s treatment response in the blood collection of samples generated by this study.