RT Journal Article
T1 Active and sham transcranial direct current stimulation (tDCS) improved quality of life in female patients with fibromyalgia
A1 Samartín Veiga, Noelia
A1 González Villar, Alberto Jacobo
A1 Pidal Miranda, Marina
A1 Carrillo de la Peña, María Teresa
A1 Vázquez Millán, Antonio
K1 Fibromyalgia
K1 Transcranial direct current stimulation (tDCS)
K1 Quality of life (QoL)
K1 SF-36
K1 FIQ-R
K1 Randomized controlled trial (RCT)
AB Purpose: Fibromyalgia (FM) is a chronic pain syndrome with a strong impact on quality of life (QoL). Treatment of this condition remains a challenge, due to the scarce evidence for the effectiveness of the therapeutic approaches available. Current attention is focused on transcranial direct current stimulation (tDCS), which has yielded promising results for pain treatment. Rather than focusing only on pain relief, in this study, we aimed to determine how active or sham tDCS (over three cortical targets -the primary motor cortex, the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex and the operculo-insular cortex-) affect QoL in patients with FM.Methods: Using a double-blind, placebo-controlled design, we applied fifteen tDCS sessions of 20’ to initial 130 participants (randomized to any of the four treatment groups). We evaluated the QoL (assessed by SF-36) and the symptoms’ impact (assessed by FIQ-R) in baseline, after treatment and at 6 months follow-up.ResultsAll groups were comparable as regards age, medication pattern and severity of symptoms before the treatment. We found that QoL and symptoms’ impact improved in all treatment groups (including the sham) and this improvement lasted for up to 6 months. However, we did not observe any group effect nor group*treatment interaction.Conclusions: After the intervention, we observed a non-specific effect that may be due to placebo, favoured by the expectations of tDCS efficacy and psychosocial variables inherent to the intervention (daily relationship with therapists and other patients in the clinic). Therefore, active tDCS is not superior to sham stimulation in improving QoL in FM
PB Springer
SN 0962-9343
YR 2022
FD 2022
LK http://hdl.handle.net/10347/29191
UL http://hdl.handle.net/10347/29191
LA eng
NO Quality of Life Research 31, 2519–2534 (2022). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11136-022-03106-1
NO Open Access funding provided thanks to the CRUE-CSIC agreement with Springer Nature. The Spanish Government (Ministerio de Economia y Competitividad; number PSI2016-75313-R) supported this research. Moreover, AJG-V was supported by a grant from the Portuguese Foundation for Science and Technology within the scope of the Individual Call for Stimulus to Scientific Employment 2017. NS-V was benefited from a grant from the Spanish Government (Ministerio de Economía y Competitividad; grant number BES-2017–082684)
DS Minerva
RD 28 abr 2026