Background/Purpose: The 2011 FM Survey Criteria can either be used as a dichotomous measure to diagnose an individual with FM, or in a continuous manner to determine the degree of “fibromyalgianess” an individual is experiencing.  Used in this latter manner, studies have suggested that this measure is predictive of decreased responsiveness to opioids in the perioperative period, and decreased improvement in pain following knee and hip arthroplasty.  This has led us and others to suggest that this measure is a surrogate measure of the central sensitization an individual is experiencing.  However, a critical portion of the central sensitization construct is that an individual experiences pain augmentation or amplification, measured either by quantitative sensory testing (QST) or functional neuroimaging.  This study examines the relationship between the FM Survey Criteria and QST findings in a cohort of individuals with osteoarthritis.

Methods: 101 individuals with osteoarthritis (ages 41 – 85, 45 male, 56 female) awaiting joint arthroplasty had a battery of self-report measures including the 2011 FM Survey Criteria.  These individuals also underwent an extensive QST battery including mechanical pain threshold and tolerance, temporal summation, and conditioned pain modulation – at both the affected knee, as well as several neutral sites (including thumb and trapezius).  The cohort of 101 individuals was then split into three tertiles of FM scores, from 0-3 (n = 37), 4-7 (n = 34), and 8 or greater (n = 30).  ANOVA was performed comparing mean QST values in each tertile.

Results: For nearly all static QST variables, there was a stepwise change in the hypothesized direction between QST measures and FM tertiles.  Most but not all of these changes reached statistical significance.  The three tertiles showed a similar stepwise increase in pain intensity, even though the FM criteria do not assess pain intensity, just distribution.

Conclusion: This is the first study to demonstrate that the 2011 FM Survey Criteria show a strong relationship to QST measures in a cohort of individuals with knee osteoarthritis.  This provides further evidence that this simple to administer measure may serve as a surrogate measure of pain centralization in individuals with chronic pain states.

« Back to 2015 ACR/ARHP Annual Meeting

ACR Meeting Abstracts - https://acrabstracts.org/abstract/the-2011-fibromyalgia-fm-survey-criteria-are-a-surrogate-measure-of-pain-centralization/