RT Journal Article
T1 Working memory performance, pain and associated clinical variables in women with fibromyalgia
A1 Gil Ugidos, Antonio
A1 Rodríguez Salgado, Dolores
A1 Pidal Miranda, Marina
A1 Samartín Veiga, Noelia
A1 Fernández Prieto, Montserrat
A1 Carrillo de la Peña, María Teresa
K1 Fibromyalgia
K1 Cognitive dysfunction
K1 Pain threshold
K1 Working memory
K1 Health status
K1 Sleep dysfunction
K1 Fatigue
AB Working memory (WM) is a critical process for cognitive functioning in which fibromyalgia (FM) patients could show cognitive disturbances. Dyscognition in FM has been explained by interference from pain processing, which shares the neural substrates involved in cognition and may capture neural resources required to perform cognitive tasks. However, there is not yet data about how pain is related to WM performance, neither the role that other clinical variables could have. The objectives of this study were (1) to clarify the WM status of patients with FM and its relationship with nociception, and (2) to determine the clinical variables associated to FM that best predict WM performance. To this end, 132 women with FM undertook a neuropsychological assessment of WM functioning (Digit span, Spatial span, ACT tests and a 2-Back task) and a complete clinical assessment (FSQ, FIQ-R, BDI-1A, HADS, PSQI, MFE-30 questionnaires), including determination of pain thresholds and tolerance by pressure algometry. Patients with FM seem to preserve their WM span and ability to maintain and manipulate information online for both visuospatial and verbal domains. However, up to one-third of patients showed impairment in tasks requiring more short-term memory load, divided attention, and information processing ability (measured by the ACT task). Cognitive performance was spuriously related to the level of pain experienced, finding only that pain measures are related to the ACT task. The results of the linear regression analyses suggest that sleep problems and fatigue were the variables that best predicted WM performance in FM patients. Future research should take these variables into account when evaluating dyscognition in FM and should include dynamic measures of pain modulation.
PB Frontiers Media
SN 1664-1078
YR 2021
FD 2021
LK http://hdl.handle.net/10347/27435
UL http://hdl.handle.net/10347/27435
LA eng
NO Gil-Ugidos A, Rodríguez-Salgado D, Pidal-Miranda M, Samartin-Veiga N, Fernández-Prieto M and Carrillo-de-la-Peña MT (2021) Working Memory Performance, Pain and Associated Clinical Variables in Women With Fibromyalgia. Front. Psychol. 12:747533
NO This study was funded by the Spanish State Research Agency (Call: Retos 2016. Project reference: PSI2016-75313-R) and Consellería de Cultura, Educación e Universidades, Xunta de Galicia (Code: ED431C 2021/04)
DS Minerva
RD 23 abr 2026