The Association of Socioeconomic Status and Symptom Severity in Persons with Fibromyalgia
Bibliographic record
Abstract
OBJECTIVE: Although persons with lower socioeconomic status (SES) generally have poorer health status for many medical conditions, the association of SES with symptom severity in fibromyalgia (FM) is unknown. The subjective symptoms of FM may be influenced by personal perceptions, and environmental and psychosocial factors. Therefore SES may influence symptom expression and severity. METHODS: Data for this cross-sectional analysis were obtained from a real-life prospective cohort of 246 patients with FM categorized according to level of education: high school graduates or less (Group 1; n = 99), college graduates (Group 2; n = 84), and university graduates (Group 3; n = 63). The association between level of education, a well-validated measure of SES, and disease severity, functional status, and quality of life were examined. RESULTS: Lower education was significantly associated with older age (p = 0.039), current unemployment (p < 0.001), and more severe disease, as measured by patient global assessment disease activity (p = 0.019), McGill Pain Questionnaire (p = 0.026), Pain Disability Index (p = 0.031), Pain Catastrophizing Scale (p = 0.015), Health Assessment Questionnaire (p = 0.001), and Fibromyalgia Impact Questionnaire (p = 0.002), but not pain level, anxiety, or depression. These associations remained significant even upon adjusting for age and sex differences. CONCLUSION: Patients with FM and lower SES, as assessed by education level, reported greater symptom severity and functional impairment, despite reporting similar levels of pain, depression, and anxiety. Although FM spans all socioeconomic groups, factors other than specific disease characteristics or mental status, appear to play an important role in patients' perception of illness.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".