Van Houdenhove, Boudewijn, Egle, Ulrich T · Psychotherapy and psychosomatics · 2004 · DOI
This review article explores whether stress might be a root cause of fibromyalgia, a condition with widespread pain and fatigue that overlaps significantly with chronic fatigue syndrome. The authors examine how the body's stress response system works and how stress-related changes might lead to abnormal pain sensitivity and other fibromyalgia symptoms. They propose that fibromyalgia could be understood as a stress-related disorder involving both physical and psychological factors.
This paper is important for ME/CFS patients and researchers because it explicitly acknowledges the substantial overlap between fibromyalgia and chronic fatigue syndrome, suggesting shared stress-related mechanisms may underlie both conditions. Understanding FM and CFS through a stress-system lens may help legitimize these conditions as physiologically-based disorders rather than purely psychiatric, while also identifying potential therapeutic targets in stress regulation and pain processing.
This review does not provide experimental data proving that stress causes fibromyalgia or CFS; it synthesizes existing evidence to propose a theoretical model. The paper cannot establish causation from correlation alone and does not present original clinical trial data. The stress disorder hypothesis remains a proposed framework requiring further empirical validation through prospective studies and mechanistic investigations.
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