Few differences in fibromyalgia among men and women

Majority of fibromyalgia victims are women, but a new research published in the journal Pain Research and Management shows there is a little difference between two sexes when it comes to feel its symptoms.

Fibromyalgia is a least recognized and poorly understood disease with symptoms such as deep tissue pain, depression and insomnia. It affects overwhelmingly women as 90% of fibromyalgia cases are diagnosed in females.

In a recent study, researchers from Spain investigated 405 fibromyalgia patients and 247 non-fibromyalgia patients over the period of two years. The researchers were interested to find out if gender-specific symptoms in fibromyalgia patients existed. They collected information on participants’ pain, lifestyle impact, fatigue, sleep issues, mental and emotional health and cognitive performance.

The men showed better working memory than women whereas sleep latency (the length of time that it takes to go from full wakefulness to the lightest non-REM sleep state) was lower in female participants, when data for male and female is compared in fibromyalgia group. The male participants from non-fibromyalgia group showed higher pain thresholds in some areas.

The researchers found that male participants from fibromyalgia group were more affected than their non-fibromyalgia male peers by some symptoms including pain. In contrast to earlier research on gender differences, they concluded that men and women only feel some fibromyalgia symptoms differently such as tender point tenderness, mental health, and sleep latency that were worse for the men than women.

“Previous research has shown that fibromyalgia men present more severe limitations in physical functioning, social functioning, and health perception. However, we failed to find these differences between fibromyalgia women and men in the present study. Our results are consistent with other studies finding no gender differences in clinical key features in fibromyalgia," they wrote. 

Results of this study still show that some severe symptoms especially pain affects females more severely than they do males.  But the researchers associated with this study don’t believe it is unique characteristic of fibromyalgia and termed gender difference of feeling pain to the way both male and female perceive and handle pain.

"In the general population, women usually present greater pain sensitivity and lower pain threshold than men, which is in agreement with the results found in the nonfibromyalgia group of the present study," they wrote.

"It has been speculated that both peripheral and central nervous systems pathways might be involved in pain experiences; however, the mechanism underlying gender differences in pain remains misunderstood."

The findings of this study clearly demonstrate no significant gender differences exist in fibromyalgia. It offers some indication that fibromyalgia affects men more severely with some symptoms, the researchers emphasized the need to further understand why men and women feel fibromyalgia symptoms differently.  

“Given the low sample size of our sample, our findings should be interpreted as preliminary and future studies with a larger sample size of men might confirm or contrast the cut-off scores suggested in the present study," they wrote.