Why improving sleep is important to uor Fibromyalgia

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This is a great article from fibro awares newsletter on slep. heidi

Your body's ability to tone down pain may depend upon how well you

sleep at night, according to research by T. , Ph.D., and

co-workers at s Hopkins.* At the SLEEP 2008 meeting in June,

presented results from a study designed to determine the

relationship between poor sleep quality and the ability of the

Diffuse Noxious Inhibitory Controls (DNIC) to relieve pain. When the

DNIC receives noxious or painful stimuli, it pours out pain-relieving

substances into the spinal cord to help filter out the impact of

future noxious inputs. A well-functioning DNIC is estimated to reduce

pain by as much as 30 percent, but this system does not work properly

in people with fibromyalgia and temporomandibular joint dysfunction

(TMD, or jaw/facial pain).

evaluated the sleep of 46 TMD patients by an overnight

polysomnography and calculated their sleep efficiency (the percentage

of time in bed that they actually spend asleep). The greater the

number of arousals during the night, the lower a person's sleep

efficiency and the poorer their quality of sleep. The level of

function of each person's DNIC system to reduce a painful stimulus

was also measured in the laboratory.

Patients were divided into the following three groups based on their

sleep efficiency rating: good, fair and poor. When the researchers

looked that the average DNIC function for patients in each group,

they found that the poor sleep efficiency group also had the poorest

DNIC function. In fact, the lower the sleep efficiency of chronic

pain patients with TMD, the worse their DNIC function (e.g., their

ability to reduce pain is poor).

The authors state that future investigations need to be aimed at

treating the sleep of chronic pain patients to determine if this

approach really improves pain. This recommendation is particularly

relevant to people with TMD and fibromyalgia, who have faulty

functioning DNICs.