Emotional Allodynia Questionnaire (AEQ) in Fibromyalgia (PEARL)

The Emotional Allodynia Questionnaire (AEQ) is an 11-item self-report instrument that measures disproportionate emotional reactivity to low-intensity interpersonal cues(perceived unresponsiveness, exclusion, loss of reciprocity), a pattern termed emotional allodynia. It was preliminarily validated in a single-center fibromyalgia sample. PEARL (validation phase) is a multicenter, prospective, observational psychometric validation study that (1) replicates the internal structure and convergent validity of the AEQ in an independent fibromyalgia sample, (2) tests its known-groups (discriminative) accuracy in separating fibromyalgia from non-fibromyalgia chronic pain of defined nociceptive or neuropathic origin, expressed as the area under the ROC curve (AUC), and (3) assesses test-retest reliability. There is no intervention.

NCT Number	NCT07677631
Lead Sponsor	University of Bari Collaborators: Universita di Verona, University of Campania Luigi Vanvitelli, University of Cagliari, IRCCS Azienda Ospedaliero-Universitaria di Bologna
Conditions	Fibromyalgia, Chronic Pain, Nociplastic Pain
Enrollment	423 participants
Start Date	2025-09-10
Primary Completion	2027-06 (estimated)
Study Completion	2027-08 (estimated)
Updated on ClinicalTrials.gov	2026-07-01