[Considerations on alterations in brain activity in patients with fibromyalgia]

Fibromyalgia is a chronic musculoskeletal pain disorder of unknown etiology, characterized by widespread pain. Clinical and experimental research has demonstrated that patients with fibromyalgia may have enhanced pain sensitivity at several points of the body, together with neuroendocrine abnormalities, and abnormal activation of pain-related brain regions. Recent data have also shown that affective and cognitive processing of pain-related information could also be disturbed in fibromyalgia. In our opinion, all these findings suggest the existence of abnormal central pain processing, which could be responsible for the persistence of chronic pain in these patients.