Getting To Know What Is Fibromyalgia
December 10th, 2009Fibromyalgia is a chronic condition where the individual is experiencing tenderness, stiffness and pain in the muscles. Other symptoms include lots of fatigue, irregular sleep and very tender soft tissue. The usual location for these symptoms to occur are the shoulders, neck, hands, pelvic girdle and the hands. There is characteristically no pain in the joints when it hits people. The pain is rather in the soft tissues all over the body including around the joints.
Let us look at the effects fibromyalgia will have on your body. The first sign is pain and the kind of pain that is excruciating. The pain depends on how badly you have fibromyalgia and also does spread around a lot in many cases. The pain is either a long stretched ache, sudden pangs of pain for seemingly no reason at all or a constant heart beat like feeling in the muscles which pain. Sometimes the pain can manifest even as a burning and even a numb feeling. There are certain external factors that play a large role in these symptoms rather the condition itself. These are the levels of physical activity that one’s body may be under (either if it is too active or too inactive), weather (cold weather worsens the pain greatly), stress (probably also anxiety) and mental and physical fatigue.
Fatigue, by itself, is another symptom of fibromyalgia. It is the condition when the body is drained of all energy to function as it should. Regular sleep is something that fibromyalgia patients are robbed of by the condition. This is because they undergo a whole lot more brain activity which is as good as being awake. So, to the body, it is like not having a single wink of sleep. Minor symptoms are dryness in the mouth, not being able to see, neurological problems, a brain that is slower than usual, rashes and restless syndrome among others.
The causes of it are not full defines but there is a primary understanding of why it happens. Its root cause is the going wrong of the central processing because of the disablement of the neuroendrocines and neurotransmitters. So the pain in fact is due to wrong sensory processing and not actually pain. Other possible reasons could also be less blood in the brain (thalamus), more substance P in the spinal cord, HPA axis hypofunction, unusual cytokine functioning and also less serotonin and tryptophan.
The affected by Fibromyalgia are mostly in the 35 to 55 age bracket. This statistic involves only women. The men, children and the elder age bracket have very little chances of catching fibromyalgia. By nature the condition being close to other diseases like systemic lupus and rheumatoid arthritis, it has one suffer from one or more of the similar diseases. It also works the other way round. When people have diseases like systemic lupus and rheumatoid arthritis, they also tend to get systemic lupus and rheumatoid arthritis. These diseases have similar causes to occur.