UK Study Finds Weather Can Worsen Chronic Pain
/By Pat Anson, PNN Editor
Do you feel “under the weather” when its rainy and cold outside? About 75% of chronic pain sufferers believe certain weather conditions can aggravate their pain. Some even think they can predict a storm coming because they “can feel it in their bones.”
A new analysis of weather patterns in the United Kingdom suggests there may be some truth to those old clichés.
For 15 months, researchers at the University Manchester collected data from over 10,500 UK residents, who recorded their daily pain levels on a smartphone app. The GPS location of their phones was then compared to local weather conditions.
The study found a modest association between weather and pain, with people more likely to feel pain on days with low barometric pressure – and the wet and windy weather that usually comes with it.
The key appears to be the upper level jet stream – a narrow band of air currents that circle the globe several miles above the earth. On days when the jet stream was aimed right at the UK, with above normal wind, humidity and precipitation, about 23% of people reported more pain.
But when the jet stream blew north of the UK, and pressure was above normal with less humidity and precipitation, only 10% of people reported higher pain levels.
“Although the weather may not be the primary cause of people’s pain, our results through multiple independent methodologies demonstrate that weather does modulate pain in at least some individuals,” lead author David Schultz reported in the Bulletin of the American Meteorological Society.
“The results of this project should give comfort and support to those who have claimed that the weather affects their pain, but have been dismissed by their friends, their coworkers, and even their doctors.“
The new analysis builds on earlier research from the Cloudy With a Chance of Pain study, which is the largest in both duration and number of participants to examine the link between weather and pain. Previous studies have found little or no association between the two.
A 2014 Australian study, for example, found that acute low back pain was not associated with variations in temperature, humidity and rain. And a 2013 Dutch study concluded that weather had no impact on fibromyalgia symptoms in women.
“Part of the reason for this lack of consensus is that previous researchers have treated the different measures of the weather such as pressure, temperature, humidity separately, which assumes that one could vary the temperature while holding all of the other weather measures fixed. Of course, the real atmosphere does not behave like this, as all the variables are changing simultaneously,” says Schultz.
Schultz and his colleagues plan to further study the data to see how environmental conditions modulate pain, insight that could be used to develop better treatments and individualized pain forecasts.
