The relation between personal resources and quality of life in patients with fibromyalgia

Introduction/Background Patients with fibromyalgia (FM) suffer from chronic widespread pain, nonrestorative sleep and varying more complaints like depressive symptoms or anxiety. We hypothesized that analogously to patients in psychotherapy FM patients have low levels of personal resources. We aimed to evaluate the reliability of the Essen Resources-Inventory (ERI), to compare resources of FM patients to other groups and to assess the association of resources to health-related quality of life. Material and method In this cross-sectional study with 169 FM patients we applied the ERI scales for personal resources, the quality of life questionnaire Short-Form 36 (SF-36) and the Patient Health Questionnaire (PHQ-4). Reliability (internal consistency) of the ERI scales was assessed by Cronbach's alpha. Scores of ERI scales were compared to historic control groups. Associations between ERI scales and the SF-36 Physical Component Summary (PCS) and Mental Component Summary (MCS) were analyzed by Pearson correlation coefficients or Spearman correlation coefficients according to the scale distributions. Results The mean age was 50.9 (SD 10.5), 94.1% were female. FM patients compared to healthy controls showed worth scores for PHQ depression (3.05 vs. 0.95), anxiety (2.98 vs. 0.90), PCS (31.9 vs. 49.9) and MCS (39.6 vs. 47.5). Internal consistency of the ERI scales was moderate to high (Cronbach's alpha = 0.67 to 0.95). The comparison of resources of FM patients to controls is presented in Table 1 . All ERI scales showed significant correlations to the MCS ( P P  > 0.05). Correlation coefficients above 0.3 were found for the total ERI personal scale ( r  = 0.38), openness ( r  = 0.39), meaningfulness ( r  = 0.35) and social competence ( r  = 0.32). Conclusion This study supports the reliability of the ERI in patients with FM. FM patients have lower personal resources than average somatic patients. Low levels of resources are associated with low levels of the mental component of quality of life.