MONDAY, Feb. 24, 2014 (HealthDay News) -- Most adolescent patients with juvenile-onset fibromyalgia (JFM) have continued fibromyalgia symptoms into young adulthood, according to a study published online Feb. 24 in Pediatrics.
Susmita Kashikar-Zuck, Ph.D., from the Cincinnati Children's Hospital Medical Center, and colleagues investigated the long-term outcomes of adolescents with JFM into early adulthood. Ninety-four patients with JFM and 33 age- and gender-matched healthy controls completed online demographic characteristics, pain, physical functioning, mood symptoms, and health care utilization assessments at about six years of follow-up.
The researchers found that, compared with healthy controls, patients with JFM had significantly higher pain, poorer physical function, greater anxiety and depressive symptoms, and a greater number of medical visits (all P < 0.001). Fibromyalgia symptoms continued into early adulthood for most JFM patients (>80 percent), with about half (51.1 percent) meeting the American College of Rheumatology criteria for adult fibromyalgia. Compared with controls, JFM patients were more likely to be married and less likely to have a college education.
"JFM is likely to be a long-term condition for many patients, and this study for the first time describes the wide-ranging impact of JFM on a variety of physical and psychosocial outcomes that seem to diverge from their same-age peers," the authors write.
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