Pain medicine : the official journal of the American Academy of Pain Medicine
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Cognitive dysfunction in fibromyalgia has become a key symptom considered by patients as more disabling than pain itself. Experimental evidence from neuropsychological and neuroimaging studies indicates that such cognitive impairments are especially robust when patients need to set in motion working memory processes, suggesting the existence of an altered functioning underlying the cerebral cortices of the frontoparietal memory network. However, the temporal dynamics of working memory subprocesses have not yet been explored in fibromyalgia. ⋯ The present results suggest that both encoding of information (as reflected by P2) and subsequently context updating and replacement (as seen in lower P3 amplitudes), as a part of working memory subprocesses, are impaired in fibromyalgia. Studying the temporal dynamics of working memory through the use of ERP methodology is a helpful approach to detect specific impaired cognitive mechanisms in this chronic pain syndrome. These new data could be used to develop more specific treatments adapted for each patient.