Quality of life in functional movement disorders is as altered as in organic movement disorders, Gendre et al., 2018

Journal of Psychosomatic Research
Volume 116, January 2019, Pages 10-16

Thierry Gendre, Guilhem Carle, Francine Mesratid, Cécile Hubsch, Thomas Mauras, Emmanuel Roze, Marion Houote, Bertrand Degos, Béatrice Garcincg

Highlights

• Quality of life was at least as altered in Functional Movement Disorders as in Organic Movement Disorders.

• Unemployment was higher in Functional than in Organic Movement Disorders.

• Functional Movement Disorders patients had no increased psychiatric comorbidities.

• More sexual abuse was reported in Functional than in Organic Movement Disorders.

Objective
Patients with functional movement disorders (FMD) often report a disability and psychiatric comorbidities. However, few studies have compared these aspects in FMD and in organic movement disorders (OMD). The objectives were to compare QoL and psychiatric comorbidities of FMD and OMD patients.

Methods
Twenty-one and 30 FMD patients were compared to 21 and 30 sex- and age-matched dystonia and Parkinson patients respectively. QoL was assessed using the Parkinson's Disease Summary Index (PDSI). Psychiatric comorbidities were screened with the Mini International Neuropsychiatric Interview, the Hospital Anxiety and Depression Scale and the Composite International Diagnostic Interview questionnaire.

Results
QoL was more altered in FMD than in dystonia on PDSI (42.1 vs 25.1; p = .003). No significant difference was observed in QoL in FMD and Parkinson's disease on PDSI (38.3 vs 32.2; p = .61). Moreover, FMD patients were more often unemployed because of their condition than dystonia (61.9% vs 14.3%; p = .01) and Parkinson patients (53.3% vs 13.3%; p = .005). The occurrence of anxiety (p = .58 and > 0.99), depression (p = .77 and 0.77), and traumatic events (p = .58 and 0.75) was not different between groups. FMD patients reported more often sexual abuse than dystonia (28,6% vs 4.8%; p = .13) and Parkinson patients (23.3% vs 0.0%; p = .02).

Conclusion
FMD patients presented a significant alteration of QoL and no increased psychiatric comorbidities compared to OMD patients. These results highlight the impact of FMD and suggest that neurologists should be as involved in the management of FMD as they are in OMD.

https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0022399918306573

 

"Quality of life in functional movement disorders is as altered as in organic movement disorders, Gendre et al., 2018"

I look at sentences/titles like this and feel very frustrated. Doctors have been dismissing pain and associated, hard to find or expensive to look for, health problems for so long now that they appear to believe that they know everything there is to know about health and sickness, and that anything they don't understand must be hypochondria or functional or attention-seeking or drug-seeking.

But every time I see references to anything being functional I just think that doctors have a knowledge gap that they won't admit to or even believe is there.

 

Not sure where else might be better to post this, but Jon Stone launched a new FND website today:

https://www.neurosymptoms.org/en_US/


There was also this on Twitter (from Vaughan Bell)

https://twitter.com/user/status/1410555678217969667

 

Wait. Sick people ARE sick?? No way.

It's almost like inventing a fake category of "things we don't understand yet=fake" is as a bad idea. Almost, because it's a catastrophically terrible idea stemming from incompetence and hubris. And of course more baggage than a large airport terminal can handle.

 

Could that have something to do with the fact that if you have been abused you are immediately classed as having a functional disease? Especially since the symptoms are often the same.

 

Well, yeah. Just like discriminated communities labeled as "naturally criminal" tend to have more crime, because of overzealous policing and socioeconomic circumstances feeding the cycle, planting of evidence, prosecutorial misconduct and other enforced errors.

But if they understood that they wouldn't be making that obvious mistake of mislabelling something then marvelling at "discovering" that it has been labeled just the way they expected, having insisted it must be done this way.