Fibromyalgia is a chronic condition that causes pain throughout the body, fatigue and other symptoms. Among the most common clinical symptoms are sleep and anxiety disorders. All these symptoms are very disabling and have a negative impact on the quality of life of these people. There is currently no curative treatment for this pathology and current treatments focus their efforts on reducing the intensity of the symptoms. The current approach is mainly pharmacological, with the possible side effects that this entails.
The NESA XSIGNAL® device is a non-invasive, low-frequency neuromodulation device that uses microcurrents to restore the electrical balance in the body. This technology is approved as medical equipment and is CE marked (attached in separate files). This non-invasive neuromodulation equipment is beginning to show promising results in patients with sleep disorders. So it can be a useful tool to reduce the impact on the quality of life of people with fibromyalgia.
Study Type
INTERVENTIONAL
Allocation
RANDOMIZED
Purpose
TREATMENT
Masking
QUADRUPLE
Enrollment
12
The electrodes will be placed with the help of gloves and adapted socks for 1 hour, each session, until 13 intervention sessions are completed. In addition, depending on the session, an adhesive electrode will be placed at the level of C7. Characteristics of microcurrents: pulsed monophasic rectangular wave with a pulse of 1.3 s and pause of 300 ms, voltage 3 millivolt and intensity 0.5 μA.
The same protocol described for the experimental group will be applied, but microcurrents device which will be previously manipulated and tested with an oscilloscope so that they do not emit electrical currents.
Hugo Gómez Garrido
Talavera de la Reina, Toledo, Spain
Change in Pain assessed by VAS
The instrument will be used to measure the change of pain before and after the intervention will be the Visual Analogue Scale (VAS). Participants will be asked to mark the level of their pain on a 100 mm, no hatched VAS scale marked at one end as "no pain" and at the other as "worst pain imaginable".
Time frame: Baseline and up to three weeks
Change in Sleep quality
The Pittsburgh Sleep Quality Index (PSQI) will be used. It consists of 19 self-administered questions and 5 questions assessed by the patient's partner or roommate (if available). Only the self-administered questions are included in the score. The higher the total score, the worse the sleep quality. Thus, a total score less than or equal to five on the Pittsburgh scale indicates that, in general, your sleep quality is optimal, while a total score greater than five suggests that you have sleep problems, of greater or lesser severity.
Time frame: Baseline and up to three weeks
Functional capacity
The fibromyalgia impact questionnaire (FIQ) will be used. It assesses the impact on health in terms of physical capacity, the ability to carry out usual work and, in the case of paid work, the degree to which fibromyalgia has affected this activity as well as subjective items closely related to this pathology (pain, fatigue, feeling of tiredness).
Time frame: Baseline and up to three weeks
Psychosomatic assessment
The Brief Symptom Checklist (LSB-50) will be used. It is a clinical instrument for the identification and assessment of psychological and psychosomatic symptoms in adults. It has been developed from the authors' experience with other symptom measurement questionnaires. The questionnaire is composed of 7 main scales (Obsessive Sensitivity, Anxiety, Hostility, Somatisation, Depression, Strict Sleep and Extended Sleep); 2 subscales (Sensitivity and Obsessive-Compulsion) and 1 Psychopathological Risk scale. It allows 3 global indices to be obtained (Global Severity Index, Number of Positive Symptoms and Positive Symptom Intensity Index), each of which is indicative of different aspects of general psychopathological distress.
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Time frame: Baseline and up to three weeks
Sleep assessment (time elapsed between each sleep phase)
Using the polysomnography technique, the duration of the different phases of sleep will be evaluated. Polysomnography is a non-invasive and painless test that allows the study of sleep, its phases (REM and non-REM) and also its various alterations. In order to recognise which phase of sleep the patient is in, and to quantify the time that elapses during the phase, polysomnography simultaneously performs an electroencephalogram (EEG), detects muscle activity with a surface electromyogram, usually submental (EMG), eye movements with an electrooculogram (EOG) and body position using sensors on the limbs.
Time frame: Baseline and up to three weeks