Chronic multimorbidity in women diagnosed with fibromyalgia in Chile

Multimorbilidad crónica en mujeres con diagnóstico de fibromialgia en Chile

Objective: to situate the population diagnosed with fibromyalgia in the multimorbid category and describe some of its characteristics by analyzing the prevalence of comorbidities, the use of clinical resources and the use of drugs in the studied population. Materials and methods: descriptive, cross-sectional study with a sample of 546 women diagnosed with fibromyalgia. Application of an online self-administered questionnaire. Use of descriptive and inferential statistics for data analysis. Results: We found that 94.7% of the studied women suffer from at least one diagnosed disease in addition to fibromyalgia and 11.4% have five or more conditions. The most frequent comorbidities are mental health disorders, with depression being the main one (70%), followed by irritable bowel syndrome (52.8%) and headache (50.3%), 51.1% have a high frequency of medical consultation and 77.3% use more than one type of drug. The average of pharmacological use is 2.8 types. Among them, 80.3% was self-medicated at some point being 1.6 the average of self-medicated drugs. Conclusions: The population with fibromyalgia is young and highly multimorbid. This group presents a high risk of morbidity and mortality due to the presence of polypharmacy and self-medication behavior, it also projects future critical multimorbidity, pathological aging and high consumption of clinical resources.