To assess the information processing capabilities in 25 patients with primary fibromyalgia (FM) by comparing them with 22 patients with major depression and 18 healthy controls.
A broad range of tasks related to various subcomponents of information processing were included.
Our results indicated that patients with primary FM in general share with depressives a nonspecific deficit in information processing capacity. However, our data showed that cognitive dysfunction reflecting a presumed compromise of the right hemisphere is present in major depression, but not in primary FM.
This finding would suggest that primary FM and depression are probably different conditions.