{"id":2242,"date":"2019-01-03T05:51:43","date_gmt":"2019-01-03T05:51:43","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/veryhealthy.life\/?p=2242"},"modified":"2021-07-20T17:22:32","modified_gmt":"2021-07-20T17:22:32","slug":"10-intimidating-fibromyalgia-symptoms-flying-under-the-radar","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/veryhealthy.life\/10-intimidating-fibromyalgia-symptoms-flying-under-the-radar\/","title":{"rendered":"10 Intimidating Fibromyalgia Symptoms Flying Under the Radar"},"content":{"rendered":"\n
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Fibromyalgia is a disease that can deeply affect the lives of people. Sadly, causes aren’t clear yet for scientists and doctors, and there is no test so far that can help diagnose this condition. The diagnosis itself is a merely clinical one, asking the patients questions and then deciding what they have is actually fibromyalgia.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The name of the disease means \u201cpain in fibers and muscles\u201d, and the main symptom is a widespread pain that heavily affects the quality of life of people suffering from it. This is what fibromyalgia is mostly known for. What most people don’t know, however, is that there is a wide array of symptoms fibromyalgia can cause, and patients don’t usually associate them with the disease. Since there is no clear way to diagnose fibromyalgia through tests or image exploration, it is fundamental that you know what other symptoms could be indicating that what you have is actually fibromyalgia.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

1. Body aching<\/strong><\/h3>\n\n\n\n

Although it is of common knowledge that fibromyalgia<\/a> makes your body hurt, people don’t really know how much this pain can actually extend, and the variety of painful sensations patients with fibromyalgia can experiment. The pain affects both superficial and deep tissue; mostly, muscles, ligaments, tendons, and joints. Connective and muscular tissue is most affected by this condition. The pain is sometimes constant but in other cases can come and go, or become more or less intense during the day.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The feeling of aching can be sharp or dull, light or intense, throbbing, or aching. Also, another quite unknown manifestation of fibromyalgia that often flies under the radar is particularly painful or intense menstrual cramps, either before or during the days of bleeding. Another aspect of pain caused by fibromyalgia that people often overlook is an increased sensitivity to pain, even when muscles and ligaments themselves aren’t aching.<\/p>\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n

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2. Muscle stiffness<\/h3>\n\n\n\n

Patients with fibromyalgia often report feeling stiff and with difficulty to move, especially when they wake up in the morning. The reported sensation is that they need to stretch and move because their body feels too rigid and the muscles don’t loosen up until a few minutes pass.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

In some cases, the feeling goes away very quickly, and patients can go on with their lives without much trouble. In other cases, the stiffness<\/a> lasts for hours, or even the whole day, making daily activities more difficult than usual. However, in the vast majority of cases, the stiffness goes away by itself in about fifteen to twenty minutes after people get up of bed. A few light exercises can help get rid of the stiffness, like some stretching and joint movement. These exercises must be performed with caution, so as not to make joint or muscle pain worse.<\/p>\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n

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3. Tenderness<\/h3>\n\n\n\n

There are different sources of pain for people with fibromyalgia. The standard symptom everyone knows about is the constant pain<\/a> felt for no apparent reason all throughout the body; during the day it can move from place to place, muscles start and stop aching at apparent random, and the intensity of pain varies for a number of unknown reasons. There is also another source of pain that is less widely known, and it is tissue tenderness.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

This symptom usually affects soft tissue such as muscles and ligaments that are around the joints; for example, the hips and the knees. When the flesh around the joints is pressured, people feel throbbing pain. Strangely enough, joints themselves don’t hurt as usually as the tissue around them does. Hopefully, someday we will reach a better understanding of fibromyalgia, and therefore learn the reasons behind this strange pain patterns and how to treat them better.<\/p>\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n

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4. Headaches<\/h3>\n\n\n\n

Most of the pain caused by fibromyalgia is seen as a primary symptom. In the language of the doctors, a primary symptom is seen as a direct result of the condition that is causing it, while a secondary symptom is the indirect result of the condition in question; in other words, it is a symptom that is derived from another symptom.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Even if most of the pain reported in fibromyalgia is considered a primary symptom, experts believe that the headaches<\/a> that often affect patients are actually a secondary symptom caused by how other muscles are affected. Headaches in fibromyalgia can be of the migraine type or the tension headache type. They are often the result of excessive tension in the muscles of the neck or even the upper back. Since all muscles are connected with each other through connective tissue (hence the name), tense neck muscles can pull head muscles and cause pain.<\/p>\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n

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5. Distal paresthesia<\/h3>\n\n\n\n

This quite odd name refers to a wide range of sensations that affect the distal parts of your body. Your distal portions comprise your hands, your arms, your legs, and your feet. Among the sensations that people with fibromyalgia report to feel, one of the most common is numbness. Patients sometimes have decreased sensibility in their fingers, and in some strange cases, their fingertips can turn very cold and even get a blueish hue (this is called the Raynaud phenomenon).<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Other possible manifestations of distal paresthesia include a sensation of tingling<\/a> or burning that isn’t caused by any stimulus or any other triggering factor. These odd sensations can appear and disappear at random, change places every time they appear, and even move up and down our bodies. Even if they can be experienced at any time during the day, the moment where they are more frequently reported is the morning right after waking up.<\/p>\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n

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6. Cognitive difficulties<\/h3>\n\n\n\n

Even though most of the symptoms of fibromyalgia affect the body, in some cases the psychological sphere manifests some difficulties. Our understanding of the disease<\/a> is still developing, and researches are still striving to find a functional connection between the muscular symptoms such as pain and paresthesia and the cognitive affectation of the disease. For one reason or another, fibromyalgia seems to partially impair some of our most widely used cognitive abilities, including memory and attention.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

This phenomenon is known among the medical community as \u201cfibro fog\u201d because patients report the feeling of a mental fog that makes their thinking process more difficult and their awareness slower. People with fibromyalgia often have difficulties focusing their attention, and when they feel pain or aching the problems of concentration get understandably worse. Also, difficulties with short term memory have been identified, as patients report it is harder for them to remember things that just happened a moment ago.<\/p>\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n

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7. Anxiety and depression<\/h3>\n\n\n\n

It is very frequent to find that patients with diagnosed fibromyalgia also match the criteria for anxiety<\/a>, depression or even both. These aren’t the only mental affections that have been liked with fibromyalgia, as stated in the previous paragraph, and the actual cause of this statistically significant phenomenon is yet to be figured out by the scientific community.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Some even say that anxiety and depression might not be a direct symptom of the condition, but rather secondary affections derived from the negative impact that the actual symptoms fibromyalgia has in the quality of life of the patients. The pain, fatigue, and stiffness characteristic of this condition might significatively alter the patients’ daily routine, and living with chronic pain can be draining and stressful. For this reason, it doesn’t seem completely unlikeable that people with fibromyalgia eventually develop emotional disorders such as depression and anxiety.<\/p>\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n

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8. Sleeping problems<\/h3>\n\n\n\n

One of the most common complaints of people with fibromyalgia is that they have trouble sleeping; or rather, resting. They don’t have insomnia<\/a>, but instead, their sleep is very light, and even the softest of stimuli can awake them. They never seem to reach a state of a deep sleep, and some studies of their neurological functions reveal that, as a matter of fact, they don’t fall into a state of deep sleep and even have episodes of high brain activity during the night similar to the activity of an awake brain.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Patients report to never feel rested after they sleep, no matter how many hours they spend in bed, and feel fatigued during the day. An additional symptom associated with fibromyalgia is a strange condition called restless leg syndrome. Patients report they feel they need to constantly move their legs to find a comfortable position, and this can prevent them from sleeping at all.<\/p>\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n

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9. Irritable bowel syndrome<\/h3>\n\n\n\n

Although the irritable bowel syndrome<\/a> (IBS) is a totally different condition with its own group of symptoms and its own believed causes and mechanisms, the frequency with which people with fibromyalgia develop irritable bowel syndrome cannot be overlooked. It is even dangerous because the presence of an irritable bowel syndrome can mask some of the symptoms of fibromyalgia, making it more difficult to diagnose and therefore treat.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Irritable bowel syndrome affects the digestive system and causes discomfort in the larger intestine. Some of the most frequent symptoms of this condition include pain in the abdomen, frequent flatulence (passing gas), abdominal bloating, and decreased absorption of nutrients. Bowel movements are affected and can either be sped up (even to the point of getting diarrhea) or the other way around and patients get constipated for no apparent reason. Although reported in a lesser amount of cases, acid reflux can be a symptom of irritable bowel syndrome.<\/p>\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n

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10. Urinary alterations<\/h3>\n\n\n\n

One of the lesser-known complications associated with fibromyalgia is the series of symptoms associated with urinary disorders. There is no intuitive connection between body pain and problems peeing, but the amount of people with fibromyalgia who also have bladder alterations is more than relevant for the study of the condition.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Fibromyalgia can cause pain when passing urine, similarly to what happens in the case of a urinary infection. As a matter of fact, many of these symptoms are very similar to bladder infections<\/a>, so they can be easily misdiagnosed. Other symptoms include smalls amounts of urine escaping during the day, like a mild case of incontinence. Also, some people with fibromyalgia report they feel like they need to go to the bathroom many times a day, more than usual, even if the amount of urine is not especially abundant when compared to a normal urinary function.<\/p>\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\r\n

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