Juvenile fibromyalgia is a chronic pain disorder that mainly affects adolescent girls. A study led by the University of Barcelona shows that resilience - the ability to cope adaptively with adversity - does not reduce the physical symptoms of this chronic disease, but could act as a protective factor at the emotional and brain level. The study, published in the journal Pain , shows that more resilient adolescents have fewer symptoms of depression and anxiety, greater self-compassion and also have brain functioning patterns more similar to those of healthy girls. The findings, obtained through surveys and functional neuroimaging techniques, open up new therapeutic avenues based on psychological skills training to improve the quality of life of these patients.
The study was led by Marina López-Solà, professor at the UB's Faculty of Medicine and Health Sciences and researcher at the Institute of Neurosciences (UBneuro) and the August Pi i Sunyer Biomedical Research Institute (IDIBAPS). Researchers from her team, Saül Pascual Diaz and Maria Suñol, first author of the article, have participated. Experts from the University of Cincinnati College of Medicine, Cincinnati Children's Hospital Medical Center and the University of Chicago Medical Center (United States) also collaborated in the study.
A pioneering study with adolescents
The study was based on the analysis of resilience and brain function in 41 girls with juvenile fibromyalgia and 40 girls without pain. "Until now, most of the research on resilience in chronic pain contexts has focused on adults and tended to define resilience as a stable trait or as the absence of psychopathology", explain Marina López-Solà and Maria Suñol. According to the UB researchers, this passive and binary view (having symptoms versus not having symptoms) is particularly problematic in people with fibromyalgia, as it prevents them from studying how they adapt to persistent physical pain symptoms. "Moreover, it does not allow us to identify which psychological skills promote better adaptation and this makes it difficult to develop specific interventions to promote them", they add.
In this study, researchers have adopted a functional definition of resilience, understood as the presence of psychological resources that allow adolescent girls to adapt despite chronic pain. "It is a more active view of resilience in adolescents, as a trainable capacity and one that could protect against the emotional suffering associated with chronic pain from the early stages of illness. This methodological choice has allowed us to characterize different profiles of resilience within the sample and to analyse how these profiles relate to specific patterns of brain connectivity", stresses López-Solà.
