BMJ 1994;309:1515 (3 December)

Letters

Chronic fatigue syndrome and fibromyalgia

EDITOR,--The relation between muscle pain, tender points, the chronic fatigue syndrome, and fibromyalgia are complex, and simplistic answers are inappropriate. In their paper Peter Croft and colleagues extrapolate their results to make two statements that I believe to be incorrect.1

My conclusions are based on 100 consecutive patients seen at Raigmore Hospital NHS Trust, who fulfilled precise definitions of the chronic fatigue syndrome 2 or fibromyalgia.3 The importance of this definition of the syndrome is that it has the same three month cut off for length of illness as fibromyalgia.3 Of the 100 patients, 99 (74 women, 25 men) had the chronic fatigue syndrome and one (a woman) had fibromyalgia. Of the patients with the chronic fatigue syndrome, 63 had muscle pain and 28 had tender points on examination, 23 had both, and five had no muscle pain but tender points. These results do not support the authors' statement that the . . . [Full text of this article]


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Relevant Article

Population study of tender point counts and pain as evidence of fibromyalgia
P Croft, J Schollum, and A Silman
BMJ 1994 309: 696-699. [Abstract] [Full Text]

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