Does Herpes Cause Fibromyalgia?

Pain — it's unavoidable. But having pain daily and all over your body can drastically limit a person's life. Many people with fibromyalgia describe this type of crippling pain. It's a mysterious disease that for many years had no known cause or treatment. In fact, it wasn't even officially recognized until 1987.

Since then, we've realized the problem is a malfunction in the central nervous system, specifically in the way the brain and nerves process the signals that cause pain. Now, researchers theorize the cause is a virus called herpes simplex virus type one (HSV-1), the same one that causes cold sores.

Based on this hunch, the researchers prescribed a drug known to treat HSV-1 combined with another antiviral drug. They report that ninety percent of patients had improved gastrointestinal, fatigue, anxiety, depression, and fibromyalgia symptoms.

The rationale behind the efficacy of these two drugs is that they attack the virus on several fronts. The virus can become dormant and hide from the immune system in nerve cells, then reactivate and travel within nerves. The drugs work together to inhibit the active virus from replicating, and stop the latent virus from reactivating.

Phase-two of the clinical trials will start in early 2013. Most fibromyalgia patients are women in their twenties to fifties and complain of gradual, chronic, and widespread musculoskeletal pain, fatigue, anxiety, and depression. Diagnosis is not easy, so if the clinical trial proves that HSV-1 causes fibromyalgia, it could lead to a new method of diagnosis, which would be a great relief to the two to four percent of Americans who suffer from the disease.