• Noah A Zucker, Alex Tsodikov, Scott D Mist, Stephen Cina, Vitaly Napadow, and Richard E Harris.
• Departments of Anesthesiology.
• Pain Med. 2017 Aug 1; 18 (8): 1582-1592.

ObjectiveFibromyalgia is a chronic pain condition with few effective treatments. Many fibromyalgia patients seek acupuncture for analgesia; however, its efficacy is limited and not fully understood. This may be due to heterogeneous pathologies among participants in acupuncture clinical trials. We hypothesized that pressure pain tenderness would differentially classify treatment response to verum and sham acupuncture in fibromyalgia patients.DesignBaseline pressure pain sensitivity at the thumbnail at baseline was used in linear mixed models as a modifier of differential treatment response to sham versus verum acupuncture. Similarly, needle-induced sensation was also analyzed to determine its differential effect of treatment on clinical pain.Methods And PatientsA cohort of 114 fibromyalgia patients received baseline pressure pain testing and were randomized to either verum (N = 59) or sham (N = 55) acupuncture. Participants received treatments from once a week to three times a week, increasing in three-week blocks for a total of 18 treatments. Clinical pain was measured on a 101-point visual analog scale, and needle sensation was measured by questionnaire throughout the trial.ResultsParticipants who had higher pain pressure thresholds had greater reduction in clinical pain following verum acupuncture while participants who had lower pain pressure thresholds showed better analgesic response to sham acupuncture. Moreover, patients with lower pressure pain thresholds had exacerbated clinical pain following verum acupuncture. Similar relationships were observed for sensitivity to acupuncture needling.ConclusionsThese findings suggest that acupuncture efficacy in fibromyalgia may be underestimated and a more personalized treatment for fibromyalgia may also be possible.© 2017 American Academy of Pain Medicine. All rights reserved. For permissions, please e-mail: journals.permissions@oup.com

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