Are most patients with fibromyalgia misdiagnosed?

Recent studies have suggested that most people diagnosed with fibromyalgia with a doctor may not have the condition. A new Care and research on arthritis One study showed that the agreement between clinicians' diagnosis of fibromyalgia and the published criteria is only correct.

For the study, 497 patients who visited a rheumatology clinic completed a health status questionnaire as well as a questionnaire badessing the diagnostic variables of fibromyalgia used by the doctor. American College of Rheumatology. Patients have also been evaluated and diagnosed by clinicians in rheumatology.

Of the 497 patients, 121 (24.3%) met the criteria for fibromyalgia, while 104 (20.9%) were diagnosed with fibromyalgia by the clinician. The agreement between clinicians and criteria was 79.2%; However, an agreement beyond chance was right. Physicians did not identify 60 (49.6%) patients with positive criteria and 43 (11.4%) patients with negative criteria.

"We have recently looked at the same problem in 3,000 primary care patients and obtained about the same results, so our findings are safe," said Dr. Frederick Wolfe, lead author of the National Disease Data Bank. rheumatic.

In an accompanying editorial, Dr. Don Goldenberg, of Oregon Health & Science University, pointed out that, to conclude that expert physicians often misdiagnosis of fibromyalgia, published criteria are superior to expert clinical judgments for the diagnosis of individual patients. He pointed out that this does not account for many variables present in clinical encounters, including the time spent evaluating and clbadifying the multiple symptoms of each patient. "The gold standard for diagnosing fibromyalgia will continue to be the opinion of experts in rheumatology, and not the clbadification criteria, as refined and intentional as they are," he said. written. "This is the only way to capture the variability and severity of interrelated symptoms as they manifest themselves over time."

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