“Fibromyalgia may be an autoimmune disease, new study on mice suggests”

But now researchers, including from Queen Mary University of London, have conducted a series of experiments on mice that will hopefully clear up the mysteries surrounding the condition and its treatment.

The British researchers built on an earlier study from 2021, in which researchers transferred antibodies from people with fibromyalgia to mice. The substances increased the mice’s sensitivity to touch and weakened their grip strength.

These symptoms are also common in people with fibromyalgia.

So the results of the study provided strong evidence that fibromyalgia works in a similar way to an autoimmune disease, with immune cells fighting the body’s own tissues—or at least that immune cells play a critical role.

Mice became hypersensitive

In the more recent study researchers went a step further and injected a special type of white blood cell from patients with fibromyalgia, neutrophil leukocytes, into the lab mice.

One of the discoveries was that the human immune cells suddenly circulating in the mice’s systems made the healthy animals more sensitive to pain.

However, other antibodies or immune cells from the fibromyalgia patients or healthy volunteer participants did not seem to have the same negative effect on the rodents.

Neutrophilic leukocytes are produced in the bone marrow and play an important role in fighting bacteria in particular, the first line of defense of our immune system.

The immune cells are normally only found in the nervous system when injured or diseased. However, the researchers were able to see how the neutrophils appeared to invade collections of nerve cells in the mice’s peripheral nervous system, which runs from the brain and spinal cord to the rest of the body.

This happened so quickly that the mice already showed hypersensitivity an hour after being injected with human cells.

Importantly, the study has only been done on mice so far, and the researchers have not tested its connection to other fibromyalgia symptoms, such as fatigue.

However, according to the researchers, the results indicate that white blood cells may be one of the reasons why fibromyalgia patients’ nervous systems become chronically painful.

So they hope the discovery paves the way for possible future treatments that target the selected immune cells.

“The results show that neutrophil leukocytes are crucial for the development of chronic widespread pain,” the researchers write. in the study.