Longitudinal Dynamic Proteomic Analysis in Fibromyalgia Patients

Fibromyalgia is a chronic disease manifested with generalized pain. The patients with fibromyalgia are also usually associated with a variety of symptoms such as sleep disturbance, daytime fatigue, cognition difficulty, other somatic symptoms, depression and anxiety etc. Because there is no available specific biomarker to evaluate fibromyalgia severity currently, it still mainly replies on patients’ subjective descriptions in clinical evaluation and follow up. Lacking of objective markers of disease brings major challenge in fibromyalgia management. Proteomic analysis conducts a comprehensive analysis in a large scale survey of protein expression in a biological system. It is an emerging scientific field to explore the overall level of protein composition and patterns in certain physiological and pathological conditions. Many researches demonstrate the advance in proteomic analysis can help to diagnose and classify the clinical diseases such as cancer, degenerative neurological disease and chronic inflammatory disease etc. Body fluid proteomic analysis (BFPA) is one mean to study the presentation and response of human body. Because tremendous amount of proteins appeared and significant protein modification / interactions can be noted in human body fluid, many technical advances are under developing to improve its validity and reliability. There are very rare data regarding the proteomic analysis in fibromyalgia currently, in addition, no available proteomic data is reported in Chinese fibromyalgia population. In present project, we plan to explore the proteomic characteristics on the saliva of the patients with fibromyalgia. We will include 30 patients with fibromyalgia and 30 healthy controls to conduct 6-month follow-up. The clinical presentations, physiological data and saliva proteomics will be collected for further analysis. With using the model of longitudinal dynamic differential analysis of proteomics, we can provide important insight in proteomic profile in Chinese population with fibromyalgia. These data can be further translated into the diagnosis and classification of fibromyalgia in the future.