Alteration of Postural Balance in Patients with Fibromyalgia Syndrome-A Systematic Review and Meta-Analysis, Nunez-Fuentes at al, 2021

Open access, https://www.mdpi.com/2075-4418/11/1/127/htm

 

A what in the what now?

No discussion of orthostatic intolerance? The hardest part of science is asking the right questions. This ain't it.

I don't know who needs to hear this but continuing to do very low quality and scope poorly-observational research on large problems is entirely pointless. No one was ever going to orbit on leg power alone, no matter how smartly designed your super-bicycle is. At some point you have to increase the scale of efforts and that point was decades ago.

 

Apparently, "somatosensory dependence" is a term for a shift away from primarily using visual information to maintain balance and towards using bodily positional information instead. It sounds like it might occur in vestibular dysfunction, because the eye muscles depend heavily on info from the vestibular apparatus in order to orient the eyes. Prolonged spinning in place, for instance, will disrupt the fluid in the inner ear and will cause your eyes to dart back and forth, briefly making them worse than useless for maintaining your balance.

I'm not really all that familiar with fibromyalgia, so I'm somewhat surprised to hear that balance problems are a fairly common component of it.

 

I dunno. My balance is worse when I'm in a flare (more fatigue) of some sort.

 

It's not the first thing that comes to mind as a symptom of fibro, indeed, it's not even in the top 10.