The prevalence of fibromyalgia in Japanese workers.
OBJECTIVE
To estimate the point prevalence of fibromyalgia (FM) among hospital workers and to make a list of the reported FM prevalence using the classification criteria of the American College of Rheumatology (ACR) for FM.


METHODS
Three hundred and forty-three females and 196 males were surveyed using the 1990 ACR classification criteria of FM. The subjects were staff workers and non-staff workers (such as floor sweepers and personnel of pharmaceutical companies) who worked in medical institutions.


RESULTS
One hundred and six of the 343 females (30.9%) and 34 of the 196 males (17.3%) had complained of widespread pain for at least 3 months. All subjects who had complained of widespread pain for at least 3 months were examined by one experienced physician. Seven of the 343 females (2.04%) and one of the 196 males (0.51%) met the ACR criteria for FM. All of these eight subjects had seen a physician after the occurrence of widespread pain. Four of the eight subjects with FM had seen a physician in the past year. Only one subject had been diagnosed with FM before this study.


CONCLUSIONS
The advantage of this study was the extremely low dropout rate. FM is a common musculoskeletal disorder among Japanese adult workers, especially among female workers.
Toda
K
K
Department of Rehabilitation, Hiroshima Prefectural Rehabilitation Centre, Hiroshima, Japan. goutatak@yahoo.com
D000328:Adult; D000368:Aged; D003430:Cross-Sectional Studies; D005260:Female; D005356:Fibromyalgia / Q000453:epidemiology*; D006801:Humans; D007564:Japan / Q000453:epidemiology; D008297:Male; D008875:Middle Aged; D010564:Personnel, Hospital / Q000145:classification / Q000706:statistics & numerical data; D015995:Prevalence