To do so, 98 FM women completed several questionnaires to assess their levels of rumination, stress, anxiety, depression, optimism, control and coping.
Researchers found that patients with higher levels of rumination had increased use of negative coping techniques and higher levels of anxiety, depression and poor sleep levels. These patients also had lower optimism and control. Higher levels of rumination correlated strongly with stress.
Together, the results indicated that ruminative thoughts influenced several psychological processes important for FM, namely stress.
“The association between stress and rumination was the strongest of all the variables tested”, the authors wrote. “High rumination was associated with high stress. We could not define the cause and effect with this cross-sectional methodology; however, we believe that it was likely that rumination generated emotional distress rather than the other way around. We have previously demonstrated that in this same cohort, stress predicted the levels of the characteristic phenotypic clinical features of FM, namely pain, poor sleep, cognition, and fatigue. These results are congruent with the effect of stress on other psychological and functional variables as reported in previous studies,” the study authors concluded.
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