About three to six per cent of world's population is suffering from chronic widespread muscle pain known as fibromyalgia (FM). The patients with fibromyalgia also undergo high psychosocial adversity levels, emotional conflict, and trauma.

To deal with FM risk factors, Lumley MA and colleagues conducted a cluster-randomised controlled trial and compared the efficacy of various modalities to manage high psychosocial adversity and emotional conflict. The modalities taken for analysis were EAET (emotion awareness and expression therapy), CBT (cognitive behavioural therapy), the field's gold standard modality for FM, and FM education. In the trial, EAET advantages for symptom management against other modalities were determined. A total of 230 adults with FM established into 40 treatment groups which were divided into CBT, education, EAET and given 8, 90-minute sessions. The assessment of outcomes was done three times, at baseline, after treatment and 6-month follow-up. The six-month follow-up assessment has taken as a primary endpoint in the analysis. Patients exhibit excellent retention to follow-up (90.4%). The Intent-to-treat examination presented no difference between EAET and FM education on pain severity (primary outcome). However, EAET exhibit better results than FM education on widespread pain, physical functioning, depression, anxiety, cognitive dysfunction, overall symptoms, life satisfaction, positive affect, and patients showed significant improvement (34.8% vs 15.4%). CBT also showed similar results as EAET on primary and most of the secondary outcomes, but EAET produced lesser widespread pain, FM symptoms and higher patient’s percentage who attained 50% pain reduction (22.5% vs 8.3%).

The EAET was found to be better than primary educational method and CBT on pain. This elucidates that EAET can be used as an alternative treatment to manage FM.