Background
How depression and anxiety symptoms affect fibromyalgia (FM) phenotypes and initial treatment outcomes remains unclear. This study prospectively investigated the impact of psychological symptoms on disease manifestations and therapeutic responses in individuals with newly diagnosed FM.
Methods
FM patients and healthy controls were prospectively recruited and assessed with questionnaires measuring emotional symptoms and disease conditions. The effects of anxiety and depression symptoms on FM manifestations and therapeutic responses (using pregabalin with/without imipramine; no placebo control) were investigated using cluster, correlation, regression, and mediation analyses through a 4-week follow-up.
Results
One hundred twelve newly diagnosed FM cases were included. Based on their psychological symptoms, patients were classified into two subgroups exhibiting different phenotypes; patients with prominent anxiety and depression symptoms (FM-AD) had more intense pain, worse disease severity, and poorer therapeutic responses than those without (FM-nAD; all p < 0.001). Correlation analyses showed that, along with pain, both depression and anxiety symptoms crucially modulated disease severity (all p < 0.001). Although pain relief conduced clinical improvement overall, linear mixed-effect regression analysis denoted that depression remission (p = 0.039), but not pain reduction (p = 0.062), determined clinical improvement for FM-AD cases. Notably, depression remission exerted a direct impact (p = 0.003) on disease improvement in FM-AD cases, independent of pain reduction (indirect effect: p = 0.101).
Conclusion
Psychological symptoms, as much as pain, vitally determined disease severity in FM. For FM-AD individuals, alleviation of depression, rather than pain relief alone, pivotally predicted disease improvement. Early detecting and addressing depression in FM management could help with discriminating phenotypes, thereby improving FM care strategy.
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