Fibromyalgia is a chronic pain-exhaustion syndrome with symptoms that include broadly variable pain in different parts of the body. It has been speculated that the reason for the symptoms is a disturbance of the central nervous system’s pain regulation system, but its exact etiology is still unknown. Fibromyalgia is affected by a small percentage of the population and a major predisposing factor to the disease is heredity.

The purpose of this thesis is to research how fibromyalgia syndrome affects the eye and vision, collect that information and translate it to Finnish. The objective of the thesis is to bring information to the reader about fibromyalgia as well as the changes it causes to the eyes and the effect it has on a patient’s vision. The information is aimed mainly for optometrists but is also useful to those who are interested in the disease and people with fibromyalgia syndrome.

The thesis is prefaced by telling the basic theory about the anatomy of the eye, fibromyalgia as a disease, its prevalence, incidence, risk factors, symptoms, and treatment. The thesis was done as a narrative literature review. The research articles used on the review were in English because there wasn’t much information on the matter in Finnish. Specific inclusion criteria were used to narrow down the number of articles used for the review. The search on different databases was done with a specific structure. At the end the literary review consisted of ten different articles.

It was found that eye-related symptoms that patients with fibromyalgia experienced is a sensation of foreign body in the eyes, dry eyes, irritation of the eye, eye pain and blurred vision.

Information about fibromyalgia and its effects on the eye is currently developing and new studies are done more and more. Ideas for further development on our subject are for example individual based studies on fibromyalgia patients and their eye related symptoms.