The Foundation for Chiropractic Progress, a professional chiropractic organization for increasing public awareness of the benefits of chiropractic, recently said chiropractic care has been shown to reduce the agonizing pain, debilitating fatigue, and joint stiffness associated with fibromyalgia.

While fibromyalgia, a medically unexplained syndrome affecting the muscles and connective tissues, responds to various treatments, chiropractic care in particular has grown sharply in popularity among the millions of sufferers for dramatically reducing chronic, widespread pain and restoring patients to healthier lives, including military personnel, such as Brig. Gen. Becky Halstead.

Chiropractic care has helped thousands of patients return to their normal lives. Now-retired Brig. Gen. Becky Halstead, the first female U.S. Army general to command in Iraq, suffered from fibromyalgia during her service.

“The adjustments and nutritional advice I received from my chiropractor helped in treating the fibromyalgia and made me feel better on a day–to–day basis,” says the West Point graduate Halsted.

“Fibromyalgia involves turmoil of the central nervous system, yielding a situation known as central sensitization, which causes heightened nervous system responses,” explains Gerry Clum, D.C., spokesperson for the Foundation and president of Life Chiropractic College West University.

“Overall health and wellness is affected by an individual’s nervous system, an area in which chiropractors are proficiently trained to address, making chiropractic care a viable option for fibromyalgia patients,” Clum noted.

While scientists continue to develop a better understanding of fibromyalgia, chiropractors aim to correct misalignments of the spine and pelvis through hands-on adjustments. With improved joint motion, fibromyalgia patients discover that the excruciating pain can be reduced or, in some cases, eliminated. Once this pain is under control, other symptoms associated with fibromyalgia — such as fatigue, sleep deprivation, and depression — also diminish.

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Research engineers and sleep medicine specialists from two Michigan universities have joined technical and clinical hands to put innovative quantitative analysis, signal-processing technology and computer algorithms to work in the sleep lab. One of their recent findings is that a new approach to analyzing sleep fragmentation appears to distinguish fibromyalgia patients from healthy controls.

Joseph W. Burns, a research scientist and engineer at the Michigan Tech Research Institute (MTRI); Ronald D. Chervin, director of the University of Michigan‘s Michael S. Aldrich Sleep Disorders Laboratory; and Leslie Crofford, director of the Center for the Advancement of Women’s Health at the University of Kentucky, report the results of their study in the August 2008 issue of the journal Sleep Medicine.

MTRI, a freestanding research institute acquired by Michigan Tech in 2006 and based in Ann Arbor, specializes in remote sensors that collect data, and in signal processing, using algorithms or computer programs to analyze and correlate the information the sensors gather. MTRI has developed an ongoing collaboration with the University of Michigan’s sleep laboratory, one of the nation’s leading clinical and research centers specializing in sleep medicine.

This years-long collaboration provided MTRI’s first opportunities to apply quantitative analysis, remote sensing technology and computer algorithms to clinical challenges, said Burns. "In this case, our analyses of sleep stage dynamics suggest potential clinical relevance," he noted. Newly explored measures of sleep fragmentation seem to correlate — at least in this study — with levels of pain reported by fibromyalgia patients.

Burns, who has a Ph.D in electrical engineering, finds more of his research is taking a biomedical turn. He and his team are working with Chervin to use signal-processing technology to record and analyze the brain waves and biophysical responses of children and adults with a variety of sleep disorders. They hope it will help them better understand conventional sleep patterns, as well as diagnose and treat sleep disorders.

They released the results of research related to assessment of sleep-disordered breathing and sleep fragmentation this past June at a conference.

Patients who may have sleep disorders often undergo complicated and expensive tests in sleep laboratories, Chervin explained. These studies collect an assortment of biophysical data that reflect brain, cardiovascular and muscle activity throughout the night. Up to now, these data had to be analyzed manually by highly trained technicians.

"We are collaborating to find new ways to analyze routinely collected data in a way that will be meaningful to the patient’s health and will help us understand how sleep disorders affect brain functions," he said.

Automated analysis of data potentially can provide improved assessments and reduce the cost of sleep studies, Burns noted. For example, MTRI and UM have developed an automated technique for assessing the severity of sleep-disordered breathing, using just two signals — brain waves and respiration — instead of the dozen or more signals typically needed for standard visual scoring of a sleep study.

"It may even become possible for people to take sleep tests — simpler and more effective than some of those currently available — at home where they can sleep in their own familiar bedrooms," he suggested.

Both partners are reaping the benefits of the collaboration, Burns said. Not only can automated technology improve clinical research; what the MTRI scientists have learned about biomedical techniques such as brain mapping, is informing their more traditional work on radar and optical sensing technology.

Michigan Tech and UM have patented the new algorithm for assessing sleep-disordered breathing, which enables them to study what the extra work of breathing does to the brainwaves of patients with sleep apnea, a sleep disorder in which breathing stops briefly many times during sleep. Sleep apnea has been linked to excessive daytime sleepiness, cognitive changes, greater risk of heart attacks and strokes, risk of developing diabetes, moodiness and depression, sexual dysfunction, among other health effects, and to hyperactive behavior in children.

The universities have filed an application for another patent for an algorithm that helps automate the assessment of patients with REM Sleep Behavior Disorder. People with this neurological condition act out their dreams during Rapid Eye Movement (REM) sleep, which can cause them to harm themselves or a bed partner while they are asleep.

Burns and Chervin published the results of that study in the December 2007 issue of the journal Sleep.

The team plans to investigate other sleep disorders and to continue to develop automated processing techniques to improve the performance and efficiency of sleep disorder diagnosis and assessment.

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