Accelerated Brain Gray Matter Loss in Fibromyalgia Patients: Premature Aging of the Brain?

By A. Kuchinad, P. Schweinhardt, David A. Seminowicz, P. Wood, B. Chizh, M. Bushnell. Journal of Neuroscience, 2007

621 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Fibromyalgia is an intractable widespread pain disorder that is most frequently diagnosed in women. It has traditionally been classified as either a musculoskeletal disease or a psychological disorder. Accumulating evidence now suggests that fibromyalgia may be associated with CNS dysfunction. In this study, we investigate anatomical changes in the brain associated with fibromyalgia. Using voxel-based morphometric analysis of magnetic resonance brain images, we examined the brains of 10 female fibromyalgia patients and 10 healthy controls. We found that fibromyalgia patients had significantly less total gray matter volume and showed a 3.3 times greater age-associated decrease in gray matter than healthy controls. The longer the individuals had had fibromyalgia, the greater the gray matter loss, with each year of fibromyalgia being equivalent to 9.5 times the loss in normal aging. In addition, fibromyalgia patients demonstrated significantly less gray matter density than healthy controls in several brain regions, including the cingulate, insular and medial frontal cortices, and parahippocampal gyri. The neuroanatomical changes that we see in fibromyalgia patients contribute additional evidence of CNS involvement in fibromyalgia. In particular, fibromyalgia appears to be associated with an acceleration of age-related changes in the very substance of the brain. Moreover, the regions in which we demonstrate objective changes may be functionally linked to core features of the disorder including affective disturbances and chronic widespread pain.

Subfields: Cognitive Neuroscience, Pharmacology, Psychiatry and Mental health

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/d74999eea0285afd0d2b1b5a264cbf55f007131e

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Citations in the corpus

Role of the Prefrontal Cortex in Pain Processing (2018, background): “Patients with fibromyalgia have threefold greater age-associated decrease in graymatter volume and significantly less graymatter density in the insula, cingulate, and medial frontal cortices and parahippocampal gyri, than healthy controls [144].”
The effect of pain on cognitive function: a review of clinical and preclinical research. (2011, methodology): “Voxelbased morphometry has been used to examine region-specific changes in grey matter volume in chronic pain patients, with regions such as the IC, the ACC and the dorsolateral PFC consistently showing reduced volumes (Apkarian et al., 2004b; Kuchinad et al., 2007; Luerding et al., 2008; May, 2008;”
Chronic pain may change the structure of the brain. (2008, background): “As neither pain-related inactivity [15], nor pain medication [3,43,68] explains this finding, the in vivo demonstration of a loss of brain gray matter in patients suffering from chronic pain compared to age- and sexmatched healthy controls could represent the heavily discussed neuroanatomical substr”
Do we need a third mechanistic descriptor for chronic pain states? (2016, background): “Importantly, these functional changes have in many instances been related to pain severity.(1,31,41,43) Therefore, while acknowledging these limitations in the current and the proposed pain terminology, there remains a rationale for using the new descriptor to distinguish patients with altered nocic”
Tuning out the noise: Limbic-auditory interactions in tinnitus (2010, positive): “Indeed, neuroimaging data do implicate the N NAc/vmPFC system in several forms of chronic pain, e.g., fibromyalgia (Becerra et al., 2001; Kuchinad et al., 2007; Schweinhardt et al., 2009).”
Towards a theory of chronic pain (2008, positive): “This result has now been replicated in chronic back pain and other types of chronic pain conditions (Kuchinad et al., 2007; Schmidt-Wilcke et al., 2005, 2006).”
Pain and the brain: Specificity and plasticity of the brain in clinical chronic pain (2010, background): “Brain morphometry studied in fibromyalgia patients by multiple researchers [18,54,57,65,92,109] have shown a regional decrease in gray matter density [18,57,109], whereas others show an increase [92], and”