Fibromyalgia: What It Is and Its Relationship with Headache & Migraine

Always love a week or a month that will help raise awareness and this week is National Pain Week. So, during this week, we’re going to be talking about conditions that can have an influence on headaches and migraines and also how headaches and migraines can interact and influence these conditions. And so today, we’re starting off with fibromyalgia.

Fibromyalgia is a chronic condition that creates multiple regions of pain throughout the body and the musculoskeletal system that is usually more of a dull consistent ache type of pain. The pain can certainly vary in intensity from lower-grade pain to higher-grade pain. General fatigue, sleep disturbances, cognitive disturbances, and strong brain fog are also characteristics of fibromyalgia.

Fibromyalgia can be quite difficult to diagnose because the signs and symptoms do look like other things and other things do need to be ruled out first before a diagnosis of fibromyalgia can be ruled in and there are actually no tests for fibromyalgia. So, it is actually a diagnosis of elimination.

Although they don’t actually know what causes fibromyalgia, they do know, or they do believe that a part of it is central sensitization. So, in this instance, then we’ve got signals that are coming in that normally wouldn’t be painful or alternatively, normally wouldn’t be that painful being registered as being much more painful than they should be.

So, hyperalgesia is when you’ve got a painful stimulus that’s then being registered as being much more painful than what it should be, and allodynia is when you have a non-painful stimulus being registered as being painful. So sometimes, this can just even be your shirt rubbing against your neck, and then it is registered as being painful or even the wind blowing by, and then you’re registering that as being painful.

This whole process is central sensitization and this hyperalgesia, and this allodynia is also experienced by migraineurs and also those with chronic headaches. So, in those that have fibromyalgia, we do tend to see that there is an increased incidence of headaches and migraines.

There are two proposed pathways for those experiencing headaches and migraines and fibromyalgia to explain why there’s an increase in headaches and migraines. One, those with fibromyalgia, because they’re in pain and discomfort and tend to move less, then they do tighten up and stiffen up through their neck and their shoulders, therefore, increasing their muscular tension and increasing their dysfunction in the joints through the neck, and therefore, it leads to an increase in headaches and migraines. Therefore, to help that, then we treat the neck so that we help get it healthier and therefore, we hope to see a decrease in headaches and migraines. Also, in those with fibromyalgia, we do tend to see that certain areas in the body do tend to be weaker so, by strengthening areas in the body, we do tend to see that there is a decrease in generalized pain in areas that can be fantastic.

The second proposed method is that due to this central sensitization, we’ve got to try to calm down by things like sleep, diet, exercise, and stress to try to calm it down to make changes.

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