A new study finds that, for people
living with arthritis and other conditions that cause chronic pain, a certain
kind of weather increases pain.
When someone tells you
that they can feel bad weather in their bones, they may well be right.
Scientists, many at
the University of Manchester, in the United Kingdom, have released the findings
of a new study that exposes a link between chronic pain and humid, windy days
with low atmospheric pressure.
The study is
whimsically titled "Cloudy with a Chance of Pain." It also appears
in the journal npj Digital Medicine.
A folk belief
supported by science
"Weather has been
thought to affect symptoms in patients with arthritis since
Hippocrates," says lead study author Prof. Will Dixon, director of the
Centre for Epidemiology Versus Arthritis, at the University of Manchester.
"Around three-quarters of people living with arthritis believe their pain
is affected by the weather."
The study included
more than 13,000 people from all 124 of the U.K.'s postcode areas, though the
researchers sourced the final dataset from 2,658 people who participated daily
for about 6 months.
The participants were
predominantly people with arthritis, though some had other chronic pain-related
conditions, such as fibromyalgia, migraine, or neuropathy.
The researchers
collected the data with a smartphone app that they had developed specifically
for the study. Each participant used the app to report their pain levels daily,
while the app recorded the weather in their area using the phone's GPS.
Weathering pain
"The analysis
showed," says Dixon, "that on damp and windy days with low pressure,
the chances of experiencing more pain, compared to an average day, was around
20%."
"This would mean
that, if your chances of a painful day on an average weather day were 5 in 100,
they would increase to 6 in 100 on a damp and windy day."
The data suggested no
connection between actual rainfall and pain. Likewise, the researchers found no
relationship between pain and temperature alone.
However, it does
appear that temperature can make pain caused by muggy, turbulent weather worse:
The most painful days for participants proved to be humid, windy days that were
also cold.
The value of the study
Dixon suggests that
the study's findings could lead to meteorologists giving pain forecasts
alongside air quality projections, which could help people with chronic pain
"plan their activities, completing harder tasks on days predicted to have
lower levels of pain."
This would be no small
thing. Says Stephen Simpson, Ph.D., of the advocacy organization Versus
Arthritis: "We know that, of the 10 million people in the U.K. with
arthritis, over half experience life-altering pain every day. But our
healthcare system is simply not geared up to effectively help people with
arthritis with their number-one concern."
This leaves
self-management as the only practical method for "helping them to get and
stay in work, to be full members of the community, and simply to belong."
Carolyn Gamble, one of
the study's participants, is living with ankylosing spondylitis, a form of
arthritis, and she expressed happiness about the new insights.
"So many people
live with chronic pain," she says, "affecting their work, family
life, and their mental health. Even when we've
followed the best pain management advice, we often still experience daily
pain."
This is made even
worse, Gamble says, by a tendency to blame oneself for flare-ups. She finds
comfort in the study's conclusions.
"Knowing how the weather
impacts on our pain can enable us to accept that the pain is out of our
control, it is not something we have done, or could have done differently in
our own self-management." Carolyn Gamble
Source: Medical News Today
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