Abstract

Researchers studying fibromyalgia strive to identify objective, measurable biomarkers that may identify susceptible individuals, may facilitate diagnosis, or that parallel activity of the disease. Candidate objective measures range from sophisticated functional neuroimaging to office-ready measures of the pressure pain threshold. A systematic literature review was completed to assess highly investigated, objective measures used in fibromyalgia studies. To date, only experimental pain testing has been shown to coincide with improvements in clinical status in a longitudinal study. Concerted efforts to systematically evaluate additional objective measures in research trials will be vital for ongoing progress in outcome research and translation into clinical practice.

Document Type

Review

Publication Date

8-8-2008

Notes/Citation Information

Published in Arthritis Research & Therapy, v. 10, 211.

© 2008 BioMed Central Lt

This is an Open Access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.

Digital Object Identifier (DOI)

http://dx.doi.org/10.1186/ar2443

ar2443-s1.xls (14 kB)
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ar2443-s2.xls (14 kB)
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ar2443-s3.xls (14 kB)
Additional file 3

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