Clinical profiles in fibromyalgia patients of the community mental health center: a predictive index of psychopathological severity

Abstract

Introduction. In recent years we have seen an increasing demand for mental health care in patients with fibromyalgia and psychiatric symptoms, although it is not clear if the symptoms are primary or secondary to the presence of the syndrome. This fact has led mental health providers to think that there would be some psychological factors influencing the vulnerability of suffering this painful syndrome, because its etiology is quite non-specific. Bradley et al (1978) identified different psychopathological profiles within chronic pain syndromes with the MMPI, which were subsequently adapted by Yunus et al (1991) for fibromyalgia. This present work studied the clinical profile in patients with fibromyalgia.

Method. Sample: 75 patients with fibromyalgia from the community mental health center and 55 healthy subjects. Tools: STAI-E/R, BDI, MMPI-2, MMPI-2 personality disorders, MMPI-2 PSY-5. Statistical analysis: descriptive statistics and mean comparison (Student’s t test). Confirmatory cluster analysis. Discriminative analysis of subgroups.

Results. Two different patterns were obtained: group A (32 %) with a typical chronic pain profile (CP) and group B (68 %) with a psychological maladjustment profile (PM). With the discriminative analysis, we obtained the coefficients of the discriminative canonical functions that maximize the differences between both groups.

Conclusions. We confirmed Bradley’s classification, obtaining two different psychopathological patterns in the fibromyalgia syndrome sample we studied. We obtained an index of psychopathological profile in fibromyalgia, which would form a new scale, from MMPI-2 for discriminating psychopathological severity in fibromyalgia.