Zeitschrift für Rheumatologie
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Quality of life and patient-centered health status has received increasing attention during the last decade. Simultaneously, there have been multiple instruments to assess quality of life in a standardized way. ⋯ This paper presents a selection of health status instruments that have been used successfully to assess health-related quality of life in patients with musculoskeletal diseases. The description is restricted to instruments that have sound psychometric properties and that have been published in the scientific literature.
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We examined to what extent patients with fibromyalgia differ from painfree control subjects in the perception and processing not only of somatosensory but also of external stimuli. For this purpose the acoustic perception of 30 patients with fibromyalgia was compared with that of 36 generally pain-free age and gender matched subjects. The groups were also controlled for organic disease of pathological dysfunction of the ear and auditory nerves. ⋯ Generalized pain had a high impact on the interaction between threshold of unpleasantness and daily noise experience. We interpret the differences in thresholds of hearing and of unpleasantness in patients with fibromyalgia as a form of either preconscious or conscious acts to protect against disturbing stimulation. Our results support the notion of a generalized disturbancy of perceptual thresholds in patients with fibromyalgia not restricted to the perception of pain.