FOR years, pain, stiffness and fatigue clung to Lauren Armistead like an invisible shroud. It was tough enough to live with fibromyalgia — but the skepticism she encountered when she discussed her condition was intolerable.

“Throw out a word like fibromyalgia and you’ll get this blank stare,” the 28-year-old said recently, sitting in her Santa Monica apartment. “For so long, it was my own private battle.”

Today, however, Armistead is slowly, tentatively opening up about a disease that is simultaneously emerging from its own mysterious black box.

A groundswell of research has begun to expose the underpinnings of the baffling disorder that affects an estimated 6 million to 10 million Americans, most of them women. Not only do the findings have the potential to ease the condition’s stigma, they also may provide clues to other illnesses for which there is no clear clause.

Fibromyalgia, experts now believe, is a pain-processing disorder — arising in the brain and spinal cord — that disrupts the ways the body perceives and communicates pain.

“There was a time when it was thought to be psychosomatic,” said Dr. Robert Bennett, a fibromyalgia expert at Oregon Health & Science University in Portland. “We now understand the pain in fibromyalgia is an abnormality in the central nervous system in which pain sensations are amplified.”

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