Fibromyalgia is a condition that causes stiffness, joint and tendons pain, and muscle tenderness. People who suffer from this health problem also experience anxiety, restless sleep, tiredness, depression and bowel problem. Fibromyalgia is a non-life threatening condition and does not cause body damages or deformity.

Fibromyalgia is a condition related to arthritis. It is just related, but not a form of a joints disease since arthritis cause joints inflammation a characteristic not present in fibromyalgia. What fibromyalgia do is caused you pain and make you feel tired. In other words, it interferes with your ability to perform your day to day activities.

This chronic problem affects both men and women. However, women are the ones predominantly affected. In fact, about 80% of fibromyalgia sufferers are women ages 35 and up.

What Are Causes and Symptoms of Fibromyalgia?

There is no concrete study as to what cause fibromyalgia. It just occurs, but it’s associated with trauma, distress and infection.
Fibromyalgia symptoms vary from individual to individual, which is why it is not easy to diagnose. With no obvious marks or signs of a health problem and no definitive laboratory test, the best thing that you can do is keep in mind the symptoms that sometimes occur every now and then.

Tender Points

What are tender points? These are pressure points, usually around the shoulder, elbows, knees, back, hips, breastbone sides, and back of your head. Pressing any of the tender points even lightly can still give you unwanted pain and even initiate the release of other symptoms.

Pain

Pain is the main characteristic of fibromyalgia, pain that is not due to tissue inflammation like what happens to arthritis. For people with a fibromyalgia, the pain is mostly due to low pain tolerance and sensitivity to many sensory stimuli. Additionally, the pain is extensive, often times it involves both sides of your body. Pain can be felt on the neck, shoulders, buttocks, arms, chest and upper back. And the pain gets worse by weather change, emotional disturbance and noise.

Fatigue

People diagnosed with fibromyalgia experience fatigue. The feeling of weariness may be linked to a lack of sleep. The body needs proper rest, and sleeping is the best way for our body to recover from fatigue. But when you have fibromyalgia, you cannot sleep properly so you woke up still feeling tired as if you haven’t slept at all. Some people even woke up with

Emotional Disturbances

Fibromyalgia also shows symptoms of emotional disturbances. It is a mental problem wherein half of the patients with this health problem also become forgetful, depressed, anxious and irritable. The problem with fibromyalgia is that it is a challenge to get a confirmatory test, so most of the people don’t know they have it. Often times, they were told their problem is due to depression.

There are times when people with fibromyalgia shows additional symptoms such as tension headaches, migraine, tingling or numbness on different areas of their body, irritable bladder, abdominal pain and frequent or painful urination.

Knowing the above symptoms can greatly help you understand what is happening to you. The part two of my fibromyalgia post will talk about how it is diagnosed and what are the possible treatments that you can undertake.