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The results of a very promising collaborative study on Fibromyalgia (FM) between King’s College, London (KCL), the University of Liverpool and the Karolinska Institute in Sweden, has been published in The Journal of Clinical Investigation.
People living with Fibromyalgia report a host of symptoms. This research has shown that many of those symptoms, including increased pain sensitivity, reduced movement, muscle weakness, and a reduction in the number of small nerve fibres in the skin, result from antibodies that increase the activity of pain-sensing nerves. This is a particularly important finding as it demonstrates that Fibromyalgia is a disease of the immune system instead of the long-held view that its origin lies in the brain. In so doing, the door may well be open to a host of new therapeutic options.
Pain Research Institute Director, Dr Andreas Goebel, said “When I initiated this study in the UK, I expected that some fibromyalgia cases may be autoimmune. But David Andersson’s [KCL] team have discovered pain-causing antibodies in each recruited patient. The results offer amazing hope that invisible, devastating fibromyalgia symptoms become treatable.”
An important finding was that mice injected with Fibromyalgia antibodies as part of the study subsequently seemed to recover once the antibodies were removed from their system. This suggests existing therapies which reduce levels of antibodies have an excellent prospect of proving effective for Fibromyalgia.
Watch this space…