Sociodemographic Characteristics, Clinical Signs and Quality of Life in Patients with Fibromyalgia

Objective: We aimed to evaluate the sociodemographic and clinical characteristics as well as the quality of life of patients with fibromy-algia (FM). Materials and Methods: A total of 37 female patients diagnosed with FM and 31 healthy females were included into the study. In-dividuals were asked about their demographic characteristics. The number of sensitive points (NSP), skin fold sensitivity, cutaneous hy-peremia and reticular skin changes of patients and healthy controls were evaluated during physical examination. Individuals were evalu-ated for pain severity using the Visual Analogue Scale (VAS), for psy-chological states using the Beck Depression Scale (BDS), for quality of life using the Short Form-36 (SF-36) and for functional status using the Fibromyalgia Impact Questionnaire (FIQ). Results: The mean age of FM patients was 39.2±6.5 years versus 39.1±6.2 years in the controls. The most frequently encountered FM symptoms were fatigue (94.6%), sleep disturbances (86.5%) and anxi-ety (86.5%). Differences between FM patients and controls were sta-tistically significant for NSP (p=0.001), VAS (p=0.001), FIQ (p=0.001), BDS (p=0.001) and SF-36 (p=0.003), and FIQ subgroups were also different between the two groups (p<0.001). In the SF-36 survey, FM patients were different from the control in the physical function (p=0.001), pain (p=0.005), general health (p=0.017), physical fitness (p=0.003), and mental health (p=0.008) portions of the survey. Conclusion: Fibromyalgia has distinct clinical features that lead to low functional capacity and quality of life. Thus, patients ’ sociodemo-graphic characteristics and the evaluation of their quality of life may be important in the diagnosis and monitoring of treatment progress