Why so many symptoms?

[chubbycheeks]

Can anyone explain why PMR has so many symptoms and so varied. Is it purely down to vasculitis ? Thanks

[Polywotsit PMRGCAuk team member]

Hello Chubbycheeks!

PMR has always been a bit of a mystery to the medical profession, and many doctors, including a lot of rheumatologists, see it as a syndrome, or a group of complaints, rather than an illness that can be explained by a single cause. When you think about it, the very name 'polymyalgia rheumatica', which basically translates as 'muscle pain all over the place' only tells us about the symptoms and nothing about the cause. It is only recently that, through the use of PET scans, the link has been discovered, for some sufferers, with large vessel vasculitis. But this only applies to about 25% of PMR sufferers. Some people have a hunch that in 'simple' PMR, the inflammatory chemicals are just primariy in the bloodstream and cause pain in the muscles and the bursas, the sacs of fluid around the joints. When you think about it, if you have these inflammatory chemicals circulating in your blood, it's not surprising if you get other symptoms elsewhere in the body, such as the awful fatigue and general feverishness. But in some people the walls of the blood vessels become involved as well.

So no, it isn't purely down to vasculitis and it might be misleading to spread the idea that it is a form of vasculitis in all cases, or even the majority of cases. But it's important to remember that research on PMR is really only just getting going - there is a lot more to find out. Whatever 'our' form of PMR happens to be, it stands to reason that we should educate ourselves about keeping our cardio-vascular system as strong and healthy as possible.

yours

Kate

[polkadotcom]

I agree with Kate, but I also think that since both PMR symptoms and steroid side effects are individual to the person concerned, it can create some mystifying differences to the person if they have just been diagnosed. I know I expected to get a 'moon face' and it never happened (although I did get some rather nice hamster cheeks eventually).

It is important to exercise as correctly as possible and an anti-inflammatory diet sometimes helps too, but most important of all is to 'pace' yourself according to your symptoms and circumstances.

[Annodomini]

My GPs are brilliant and trust me to reduce my medication in my own good time, but they don't believe that PMR affects areas of the body other than the shoulders and the pelvic girdle. However, reading all the blogs on this site, it's clear to me that this is far from the truth and that we all have our own range of symptoms. I know that I have pre-PMR aches and pains, but there are others - like backache - that arrived at the same time as the diagnosis. GPs really need to know about this. And the shoulder aches certainly do extend all the way down to the elbows and sometimes to the wrists as well!