Impact of electromagnetic field exposure on pain, severity, functional status and depression in patients with primary fibromyalgia syndrome

Electromagnetic fields as a non-invasive alternative therapy for the treatment of musculoskeletal diseases

“…Most of the studies that carried out trials of the application of EMF in the management of any pathology were developed in accordance with Declaration of Helsinki (Casalechi et al, 2020;Elshiwi et al, 2019;Mohajerani et al, 2019;Multanen et al, 2018) or endorsed by institution's ethics committee. Some studies used measurement scales to know the level of improvement in both pain, inflammation or disability of patients, such as visual analog scale (VAS) (Hattapoğlu et al, 2019;Kopacz et al, 2020), Western Ontario and McMaster Universities Osteoarthritis Index ( WOMAC) (Bagnato et al, 2016;Chen et al, 2019), Fibromyalgia Impact Questionnaire (FIQR) (Paolucci et al, 2016), Generalized Pain Index (WPI) (El Zohiery et al, 2021), Numerical Pain Rating Scale (NRS) (Abdulla et al, 2019;El Zohiery et al, 2021), Health Assessment Questionnaire (HAQ) (Paolucci et al, 2016) and American Spinal Injury Association (ASIA, Tarlov Scale (Ross et al, 2017). It is important to highlight that there were several modalities of EMF therapy approved by the Food and Drug Administration, where one of them was the PEMF, which is one of the most used therapies in the studies analyzed (Hu et al, 2020;Iwasa & Reddi 2018;Pesqueira et al, 2018;Ross et al, 2017;Vicenti et al, 2018).…”

“…There are some studies in which results are not entirely conclusive on the effectiveness of the treatment, either the lack of an established protocol or results of the real treatment versus the combination with other methods or treatments (Camacho et al, 2019;Marycz et al, 2018;Qiu et al, 2020). However, it has been found that recent studies have results where the improvement of patients is perceptible either in pain management, inflammation (Abdulla et al, 2019;Arabloo et al, 2017;Chen et al, 2019;Hattapoğlu et al, 2019;Multanen et al, 2018;El Zohiery et al, 2021) or in a reduction of recovery time in the case of fractures (Mohajerani et al, 2019). Most of the studies were carried out to treat bone pathologies; for instance, magnetic stimulation was applied to treat fractures, evidencing faster repair bones (Hu et al, 2020;Kamei et al, 2018;Maziarz et al, 2016;Waldorff et al, 2017).…”

“…Finally, there were applications focused on the regeneration of bone or cartilage tissues by stimulating proliferation, differentiation and synthesis of extracellular matrix proteins (Kamei et al, 2018;Marycz et al, 2018;Maziarz et al, 2016;Pesqueira et al, 2018;Wang et al, 2019), where mesenchymal stem cells are magnetically stimulated, so that the differentiation process is successful, observing an improvement in the functional capacity of patients (Marycz et al, 2018;Maziarz et al, 2016). In treatments proven in muscle and nerve pathologies, transplantation techniques and stimulation of bone marrow stem cells are found in a minimally invasive way (Abdulla et al, 2019;Hattapoğlu et al, 2019;Hochsprung et al, 2021;Ross et al, 2017;El Zohiery et al, 2021). It was evidenced that SMF regenerate peripheral nerves, relieve pain, improve blood flow, microcirculation and tissue…”

“…Studies focused on treatments and/or trials to heal musculoskeletal pathologies are mainly directed to low back pain diseases (Abdulla et al, 2019;Elshiwi et al, 2019;Nayback-Beebe et al, 2017), fibromyalgia (El Zohiery et al, 2021;Multanen et al, 2018;Paolucci et al, 2016), rotator cuff tendinopathy (Klüter et al 2018), lesions affecting the musculoskeletal system and soft tissues (Pasek et al, 2016), tendon tissue regeneration (Pesqueira et al, 2018). Magnetic stimulation has been focused on the implementation of PEMF between 30 and 50 Hz and magnetic flux densities from 14 µT to 12 mT and MF between 3 Hz and 3 KHz and magnetic flux densities from 0.25 µT to 80 mT.…”

“…The most used signals generated by these devices were sine, pulse, triangular and sawtooth waves, with the possibility of varying field intensity, frequency and useful cycle (Bachl et al, 2008;Hu et al, 2020;Qiu et al, 2020;Waldorff et al, 2017). Among the applications of different types of signals, the sine wave was found to be applied to nerves and muscles, pulse wave in bone diseases and triangular wave in cartilage, tendon and similar dysfunctions (Krawczyk et al, 2017) Most of the studies are focused on the treatment of pain, inflammation and tissue growth or regeneration (Abdulla et al, 2019;Arabloo et al, 2017;Hattapoğlu et al, 2019;Multanen et al, 2018;El Zohiery et al, 2021); nevertheless, pathologies with the greatest application of treatments are osteoarthritis (Bagnato et al, 2016;Hu et al, 2020;Maziarz et al, 2016;Mori, 2019;Paolucci et al, 2020;Wu et al, 2018), low back pain (Abdulla et al, 2019;Elshiwi et al, 2019;Nayback-Beebe et al, 2017), fibromyalgia (Multanen et al, 2018;Paolucci et al, 2016;El Zohiery et al, 2021) and fractures (Hu et al, 2020;Kamei et al, 2018;Maziarz et al, 2016;Waldorff et al, 2017). The most used procedure is the PEMF, generally used in combination with other types of therapies, finding positive results and improvements in the symptoms of musculoskeletal diseases.…”