Commonalities and differences in abnormal peripheral metabolites between patients with fibromyalgia and complex regional pain syndrome

Abstract

Background: Fibromyalgia (FM) and complex regional pain syndrome (CRPS) share many pathological mechanisms related to chronic pain that could contribute to multifactorial pathological mechanisms.

Methods: We investigated peripheral metabolites in FM and CRPS patients compared to healthy controls based on cross-sectional study.

Results: Mean corpuscular hemoglobin (p < 0.001), mean corpuscular volume (p = 0.014), and total bilirubin levels (p = 0.017) were lower in FM patients than in healthy controls. On the other hand, CRPS patients showed lower levels of total bilirubin than healthy controls (p = 0.037). Creatinine level was lower in FM patients (p = 0.057) compared to healthy controls, particularly when comparing the low-hemoglobin subgroup among FM patients (p = 0.035) with the low-hemoglobin subgroup among healthy controls. Red blood cell count (r = –0.620, p = 0.031), hematocrit (r = –0.593, p = 0.042), and creatinine level (r = –0.598, p = 0.040) showed negative correlations with McGill Pain Questionnaire-Affective (MPQ-A) scores in FM patients. A negative correlation was observed between MCV and McGill Pain Questionnaire-Sensory scores (r = –0.680, p = 0.015) in CRPS patients.

Conclusion: We found specific peripheral metabolites that may exhibit different tendency between FM and CRPS patients as well as some common metabolites, which may be associated with peripheral pathology in the patients. Considering this study had a few limitations such as a small sample sizes and using a liberal threshold of significance in the correlation analysis, future studies with larger sample sizes may be needed to generalize these findings.

Keywords:

• Fibromyalgia
• complex regional pain syndrome
• hemoglobin
• creatinine
• bilirubin

Acknowledgments

The authors thank all participants for their valuable time engaging with this research.

Disclosure statement

The authors have no conflicts of interest to declare.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the National Research Foundation of Korea (NRF) grant funded by the Korea government (MSIT) (No. NRF-2018R1A2B6001806).