An at-home electrical stimulation intervention, coupled with exercise and pain education, can significantly reduce fibromyalgia-associated pain, according to results of a clinical trial published yesterday in JAMA Network Open.
Wolnei Caumo, M.D., Ph.D., at the Universidade Federal do Rio Grande do Sul in Porto Alegre, Brazil, and colleagues enrolled 112 adult women ages 18 to 65 with fibromyalgia for their clinical study. Half of the women received a home-based transcranial direct current stimulation (tDCS) headset, which has the anode situated over the left dorsolateral prefrontal cortex (DLPFC) and the cathode placed over the right DLPFC and continuously delivers 2 mA of current. The protocol involved five 20-minute stimulation sessions each week for four weeks.
The other half of the participants received a sham headset that appeared the same but only delivered current for 30-second segments at the beginning, middle, and end of the 20-minute session. All participants also received a chronic pain-management package that included a motivational interview, a suite of educational videos, and an exercise program. At the trial’s start, all women received one sham stimulation session to see if they were prone to experiencing a placebo response.
The women reported their Multidimensional Pain Interference Index (MPII) each week during treatment and again at a three-month follow-up. The MPII measures levels of pain across seven daily activities (general activity, walking, work, mood, enjoyment of life, relationships, and sleep).
After four weeks, MPII scores dropped significantly more in the tDCS group than the sham group across the treatment period and follow-up, with slightly greater decreases seen in placebo responders (49.3% reduction) than non-responders (40.6% reduction). Overall, 62.5% of women in the tDCS group cut their MPII scores in half or more, compared with 37.5% of women in the sham group. Further, nearly 85% of women in the tDCS group reported feeling moderately better or much better after four weeks.
The treatment benefits persisted at the three-month follow-up, though overall MPII scores did rise slightly.
For related information, see the American Journal of Psychiatry article “Spaced Transcranial Direct Current Stimulation for Major Depression” and the accompanying editorial “Spaced Transcranial Direct Current Stimulation for Depression: The Road Less Traveled.”
(Image: Getty Images/iStock/FG Trade)
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