Authors’ reply: Fibromyalgia and carpal tunnel syndrome

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Abstract
Recently, Cimmino et al 1 reported an epidemiological survey on the prevalence of carpal tunnel syndrome (CTS) in patients with fibromyalgia syndrome (FM). These authors found that 9.7% of 93 patients studied after mailing a questionaire had both CTS and FM, suggesting an association between them and that there were possible similarities in the aetiopathological mechanisms. Cimmino et al referred to our previous report on CTS and FM2 in which we observed 33 patients with CTS in a group of 206 consecutive FM patients (16%), and they suggest that this 16% means that underlaying mechanisms may be common for CTS and FM. We cannot agree with this suggestion. Our study was not controlled, but no statistically significant differences could be appreciated in the prevalence of CTS in FM women (29 of 191) from our series with that in general population women reported by de Krom et al (35 of 340).3 On the other hand, we noticed that CTS had been overlooked in 27 of 191 (14.1%) women with FM in our series despite mean duration of CTS symptoms of 8.1 years (range 6 months to 15 years)2 while only 23 of 340 (6.7%) women …

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