Chronic Overlapping Pain Conditions in people with [ME/CFS]: a sample from the Multi-site Clinical Assessment of ME/CFS (MCAM) study, 2024, Fall et al

Background
Chronic overlapping pain conditions (COPCs), pain-related conditions that frequently occur together, may occur in patients with myalgic encephalomyelitis/chronic fatigue syndrome (ME/CFS) and could impact illness severity. This study aimed to identify comorbid COPCs in patients with ME/CFS and evaluate their impact on illness severity.

Methods
We used data from 923 participants in the Multi-Site Clinical Assessment of ME/CFS study, conducted in seven U.S. specialty clinics between 2012 and 2020, who completed the baseline assessment (595 ME/CFS and 328 healthy controls (HC)). COPCs included chronic low back pain (cLBP), chronic migraine/headache (cMHA), fibromyalgia (FM), interstitial cystitis/irritable bladder (IC/IB), irritable bowel syndrome (IBS), temporomandibular disorder (TMD). Illness severity was assessed through questionnaires measuring symptoms and functioning. Multivariate analysis of variance and analysis of covariance models were used for analyses. Log-binomial regression analyses were used to compute prevalence of COPCs and prevalence ratios (PR) between groups with 95% confidence intervals. Both unadjusted and adjusted results with age and sex are presented.

Results
76% of participants with ME/CFS had at least one COPCs compared to 17.4% of HC. Among ME/CFS participants, cMHA was most prevalent (48.1%), followed by FM (45.0%), cLBP (33.1%), and IBS (31.6%). All individual COPCs, except TMD, were significantly more frequent in females than males. The unadjusted PR (ME/CFS compared to HC) was highest for FM [147.74 (95% confidence interval (CI) = 20.83-1047.75], followed by cLBP [39.45 (12.73-122.27)], and IC/IB [13.78 (1.88-101.24)]. The significance and order did not change after age and sex adjustment. The COPC comorbidities of cLBP and FM each had a significant impact on most health measures, particularly in pain attributes (Cohen’s d effect size 0.8 or larger). While the impact of COPC comorbidities on non-pain attributes and quality of life measures was less pronounced than that on pain, statistically significant differences between ME/CFS participants with and without COPCs were still evident.

Conclusions
More than 75% of ME/CFS participants had one or more COPCs. Multiple COPCs further exacerbated illness severity, especially among females with ME/CFS. Assessment and management of COPCs may help improve the health and quality of life for patients with ME/CFS.

Link | PDF (BMC Neurology, October 2024, open access)

 

No mention of neuropathic pain which I find surprising. I guess this is such an old study that the more recent findings of small fiber neuropathy in ME/CFS were not even considered. Not even a mention of it in the paper. Perhaps that would fall under the FM category.

 

There is a piece on this here but I'm not sure whether anyone will be able to read it as it may be pay-walled. For some reason I'm blocked even seeing the page, I just saw it highlighted by someone else elsewhere.

___ [No authors listed].
Prevalence and impact of
comorbidities in patients with
ME/CFS.
Phys Weekly. 2024 Oct 18.

https://www.physiciansweekly.com/prevalence-and-impact-of-comorbidities-in-patients-with-me-cfs/

 

This may be due to geoblocking. Is this an American website? Are you in Europe @Dolphin ?

Some American websites decided to block every visitor from the EU, due to the EU's strict GDPR laws. They find it easier to block this area than to make their website GDPR compliant for people from the EU. Some websites may simply block everyone from Europe instead of concentrating on EU member states.

This may not be the reason but this is my guess. I was blocked too. Maybe someone from outside Europe can try and share the article with us if they have access?

 

Someone has kindly sent me this. It basically just repeats what is in the abstract.

 

Holy crap people it's literally called MYALGIC, meaning muscle pain. That the pain originates from muscles is unlikely to be accurate but pain is obviously part of the illness and of most criteria, as long as one doesn't rely on useless criteria like Sharpe's Oxford criteria. This is not some co-occuring anything it's literally a common feature of the illness. And so are digestive problems and pain. Get your damn shit together.

All of this was caused by the giant screwups in the 80s/90s to create standalone psychosomatic disorders based on single symptoms, and ever since psychosomatic ideologues have been wandering around noticing connections that are literally part of the initial information given to them by patients, if only they had listened for once in their damned career.

This is the same crap as the DanFunD study noticing how there are co-occuring disorders when actually they're all overlapping, in their actual criteria, and part of the same illness presentations. They're just completely wasting their time and our lives doing the same useless work over and over again, when the whole thing could have been solved already if they had just listened. We literally gave them all this information decades ago. This is why the first papers on LC, authored by pwLC, have done this far better than any professional study published since.

I keep seeing the same pattern all over health care, where loads of complete amateurs who just pay attention to what's going on predict the future far more accurately than almost all of the professionals combined. If they could just figure out who is capable of doing that, super predictors, of paying attention and building an accurate record of predictions, they could simply replace most of the experts and their useless busywork, save billions and be far better off in the end. This is not normal.