Study establishes biological basis for fibromyalgia in 100,000 Danes

An international research project has found that fibromyalgia is a disorder of the nervous system with a biological cause, DR reports. The findings provide new evidence for a condition that affects up to 100,000 Danes with severe pain in their bones, joints and muscles.

The study included 5,000 Danish participants and analysed genetic data from more than 2.5 million adults across seven countries. Its results have been published in the scientific journal Nature Medicine.

Researchers identified 26 areas of the genome that affect the risk of developing fibromyalgia. These genes account for up to 10 per cent of the cause of the condition, according to Thomas Folkmann Hansen, a professor of Translational Neurogenetics and Multiomics at DTU Health Technology and Rigshospitalet, who led the Danish part of the study.

He described the result as “relatively groundbreaking” because people with fibromyalgia have often faced uncertainty about the nature of their illness. The condition has been classified in different ways over the years, ranging from a mental illness to a muscle pain disorder.

“It is a patient group that has been passed back and forth between different medical specialties,” Hansen told DR’s P1 Morgen.

The findings may help people with fibromyalgia better explain their condition to others and confirm that it has a biological basis. However, genetics cannot explain the entire mechanism behind the illness.

People carrying many of the risk variants will probably develop fibromyalgia only when other factors are present, such as a painful joint disease or other triggering events, Hansen told Berlingske.

The new knowledge cannot yet be used to treat fibromyalgia, which currently has no cure. Hansen said it was impossible to know whether effective treatments would take one, five or 10 years to develop, but that progress would be faster than if researchers had known nothing about the condition’s origins.