4 Facts About Fibromyalgia
When you suffer from fibromyalgia it’s easy to suffer in the silence. Fibromyalgia is often called an invisible illness because there are very few outward symptoms.
Medical professionals have developed guidelines to help diagnose fibromyalgia, but because we don’t currently understand what causes it, it can be very difficult to treat effectively. Here are four facts about fibromyalgia.
How Fibromyalgia Affects Your Body
More than 5 million people in the United States are affected by fibromyalgia. Fibromyalgia is a syndrome that affects a person’s muscles and soft tissue, causing chronic pain, fatigue, and sleep problems.
Practical Tips for Living With Fibromyalgia- Housecleaning
It can therefore be difficult for anyone who doesn’t have it to understand its various symptoms. There’s chronic widespread pain in joints, muscles and connective tissue, and fatigue. The latter is not simply a feeling of being tired, but a debilitating lack of energy that impacts every aspect of the person’s life. Other common symptoms include stiffness and headaches but there are a lot of symptoms associated with fibromyalgia. Here are a few that are particularly difficult to talk about.
1. Diarrhoea, constipation, bloating and flatulence Also know as irritable bowel syndrome, our bowel just doesn’t function as it should. This can be due to food intolerances but it can be very difficult to identify the causes. Often, unpredictable and/or uncontrollable stress impacts these difficult and inconvenient bowel symptoms. At times it can be unpredictable bowel habits that mean a sufferer is unable to leave the house or has to plan trips around being able to find a toilet quickly.
Pole dancing helped my pain
Lucy Cropper has fibromyalgia, a condition which causes pain all over her body.
At times it was so excruciating she could barely move – until she found pole dancing gave her much-needed relief.
She now teaches classes in Witney, Oxfordshire.
Watch the video here.
Blood test for fibromyalgia
IQuity has developed a blood test that uses RNA gene expression analysis to diagnose fibromyalgia.
The IsolateFibromyalgia test can evaluate whether a person’s gene expression pattern is consistent with fibromyalgia. Expression is the process by which information from a gene is used to create a functional product like protein or RNA.
IsolateFibromyalgia is 94 percent accurate, the company said.
IQuity developed RNA blood tests for three other conditions in 2017. One test is for multiple sclerosis and the other for irritable bowel syndrome and inflammatory bowel disease.
“RNA analysis is a cutting-edge tool for doctors that has great potential in the field of medical diagnostics,” Chase Spurlock, IQuity’s CEO, said in a press release.
“Unlike DNA, which can predict the risk of certain diseases, RNA shows what’s taking place right now in a patient’s cells,” he said. “That information can speed up the pace of diagnosis for physicians, leading to faster, more effective treatment for patients.”
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