ABSTRACT
Are functional somatic syndromes specific or are they clinical variants of a single disorder? The conventional clinical wisdom has been shaped by the efforts of research collectives to define these conditions in terms unique to the medical specialties most involved with the care of discrete complaints. The sample consisted of 686 consecutive patients receiving care from two hospital-based family medicine clinics in Montreal. The patient group had a mean age of 44 years and a modest preponderance of women. The hypothesis that functional somatic syndromes represent entities distinct from each other provided a good fit to the data. Investigators from the University of Washington, Seattle, and University of Illinois, Chicago, further expanded the body of evidence for the overlap between medically unexplained somatic syndromes in a co-twin control study that controlled the data for genetic and environmental factors. The best-documented associations were found to exist between irritable bowel syndrome and fibromyalgia, chronic fatigue syndrome, chronic pelvic pain, and temporomandibular disorder.
