Recently, the revised 2016 version of the 2010/2011 fibromyalgia (FM) criteria was released. No study has yet assessed whether the 2016 criteria perform better than the previous criteria. Therefore, we validated a Korean version of the revised FM criteria and explored whether they were better than the previous criteria in terms of diagnostic accuracy.
We enrolled 86 FM patients and 89 patients with various rheumatological disorders, including rheumatoid arthritis, systemic lupus erythematosus, osteoarthritis, and myofascial pain syndrome. All patients were invited to complete a questionnaire that included the revised Fibromyalgia Impact Questionnaire (FIQ), the EuroQol five-dimensional questionnaire (EQ-5D), and the Multidimensional Health Assessment Questionnaire (MD-HAQ).
The test-retest reliability of the revised criteria was assessed in 30 patients after 2 weeks; the Spearman coefficient ranged from 0.616 to 0.910 and the Cronbach's alpha was 0.942 (95% CI: 0.930-0.964). The revised criteria correlated significantly with the revised FIQ score (P < .001), the EQ-5D score (P < .001), and the MD-HAQ score (P < .001). Using the revised criteria, FM was diagnosed in 94.2% of patients with a prior diagnosis of FM, and in 10.1% of those with other rheumatological disorders. The sensitivity and specificity of the revised criteria were 93.1% and 90.7%, respectively. The area under the receiver operating characteristic curve of the revised criteria was 0.966, higher than those of the 1990, 2010, and 2011 criteria.
The revised criteria are reliable and valid when used to diagnose patients with FM, and are better than the previous criteria.