Guide To The Causes, Risk Factors, Complications, And Triggers For Fibromyalgia

Fibromyalgia is a debilitating syndrome that mainly affects an individual's soft tissue and muscle. It results in pain throughout the body and mental distress. Classic symptoms include stiffness and pain in the jaw, stiff joints and muscles, irregular sleep, painful menstruation, and restless leg syndrome. Other common signs are concentration and memory problems, widespread pain, muscle tiredness, headaches, irritable bowel syndrome, numbness and tingling in extremities, temperature sensitivity, and fatigue. This disease is usually distinguished from others by eliminating other potential causes for an individual's symptoms, which must have been persistent for three months or longer.

Treatment for fibromyalgia focuses on pain management and quality of life. Many patients will need pain medication to manage their symptoms. Natural remedies for fibromyalgia can also help reduce their pain. This may include light stretching and exercise on good days. Some individuals also benefit from a fibromyalgia diet. Of course, it is crucial to understand the causes and triggers for this condition first to achieve the best treatment. Learn about these triggers and risk factors now.

Physical And Emotional Trauma

Physical and emotional trauma can cause the development of fibromyalgia and trigger symptom flares. The mechanism behind this is linked to the affected individual's hypothalamic-pituitary-adrenal axis. Emotional stressors can activate the physiological stress response. This leads to the delivery of sensory input information to the brain. Repeated and excessive stimulation of the functional units of this response in an individual can cause their effector systems to become more sensitive. Greater sensitivity causes alternative or less significant stressors to activate the stress response easily.

The combination of the stress response, emotional reactions, physiological responses, and biological reactions that occur and interact with each other due to physical and emotional trauma can cause the development of fibromyalgia. Out of the population of patients with this condition, around half have existing post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD). Two-thirds of these individuals developed fibromyalgia after the start of their PTSD. Some individuals may be at an increased risk of developing fibromyalgia due to the failure of certain psychological buffers to work effectively on emotional stress caused by everyday life events. Physical trauma contributes because it causes emotional stress. These mechanisms related to the patient's brain may primarily drive the chain of neurophysiological responses known to cause fibromyalgia.

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Genetics

Genetics can cause some individuals to be at an increased risk of developing fibromyalgia. The exact mechanisms are not entirely clear. However, variations in numerous genes with small defects are known to increase an individual's risk of developing this condition. The affected genes are known to have roles in how the individual's brain perceives pain. Neurotransmitters are chemicals responsible for sending signals from one nerve cell to the next. Genes involved in the processes of neurotransmitter production and breakdown may contribute.

Studies have shown individuals with first-degree relatives like parents or siblings affected by fibromyalgia have a risk for the disease that is eight times higher than the general population. First-degree relatives of individuals with this condition are often affected by irritable bowel syndrome, headaches, temporomandibular joint dysfunction, and other problems involving chronic pain. Due to sharing the same genetically related risk factors, these types of disorders may aggregate in families. Genes identified to have relevance in pain perception include those that control voltage-gated sodium channels, mu-opioid receptors, dopaminergic pathways, and GABAergic pathways.

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