Does Bad Weather Bring Out Pain?

When the sky is cloudy, I tend to feel pressure in my frontal sinuses. It is not quite painful, but it does not feel good either. The sinus cavities are air channels, and any change in pressure, especially a fall in barometric pressure, affects those areas. This forces fluid into tissues and can cause a disruption in fluid balance. Researchers believe that barometric changes can impact the pressure in your brain, affecting how your brain processes pain. 1 Additionally, a 2006 Taiwanese study found a correlation between low barometric pressure and pain in a yearlong study of patients visiting a pain clinic. 2

However, last week, we had four days of dark, rainy, cold, and windy weather. A nagging bruise on my heel that I sustained almost six months ago was noticeably much worse. I was stuck inside, so I did not walk much. For the first time in my life, I wondered if the weather had anything to do with my increased pain because I had no other reasonable explanation.

Many individuals who suffer from chronic pain often attribute their discomfort to the weather. However, there is no clear scientific evidence to support this belief. This is mainly due to the challenge of obtaining a large dataset of patients frequently recording their pain symptoms during various weather conditions. But things have changed.

Smartphones to the Rescue

Fortunately, smartphones provided a solution to this problem by allowing for mass-collection of data. A recent study, cleverly called Cloudy with a Chance of Pain, analyzed daily data from 2,658 subjects in the UK over 15 months. The results showed that there are significant relationships between pain and relative humidity, pressure, and wind speed. These correlations remained even when considering the patient's mood and physical activity. The study used a passive collection of data from large numbers of participants. Previous attempts to passively collect information resulted in 10% collection for one week or less. The study we are discussing preserved 65% for the first week and 44% for the first month. Approaches like this one could result in data collection for a wide variety of research in the future.

The Study

The researchers created an app that subjects uploaded their symptoms to. They were then correlated them to weather conditions. The app used location via GPS so the weather could be matched when the subjects traveled. Initially, there were over 13,000 participants, most of whom did not enter enough data to be of use. Of the remaining 2,658 used for the analysis, 1,235 gave one month of data, and the remainder gave 2-15 months' worth of data. The median days active for the final cohort was 165 days, with an average of reporting 73% of the time. Weather factors included relative humidity, wind speed or increase, atmospheric pressure, temperature, and precipitation. This study is the most comprehensive one of its kind to date.

Results

The study found that people with long-term pain conditions experienced increased pain severity with higher relative humidity, wind speed, and lower atmospheric pressure. The most significant factor was relative humidity. The participants believed that lower temperatures with rain were responsible for increased pain, which means bias did not seem to affect the results. The effects were considered statistically moderate. The worst combination of weather effects resulted in a 20 percent increase in pain.

Conclusion

The results of the study support that weather and pain are related. They may eventually lead to weather forecasters being able to use a pain scale to warn those who suffer from chronic pain. Those with pain may be able to schedule activities around the days when they may experience more pain. The shortfall of the study is that no causative mechanism for the connection was looked into. Once a definitive connection between the weather and pain is established, researchers can establish the mechanisms involved. This way, pain response to weather conditions could be a thing of the past.