Adam’s journal
With the arrival (finally) of cooler temperatures, we received a seasonally related question from one of our readers.
Danny, of Oklahoma City, wrote, “My whole life, I have heard from my elders that a change in the weather can cause your joints to ache. I used to think this was just an excuse for them to talk about their latest illnesses. But now that I am getting older myself, it seems to be true. Is there any scientific evidence to back this up?”
Dr. Prescott prescribes
The idea that joint pain fluctuates with the weather dates back at least to 400 B.C., to when Hippocrates (he of the Hippocratic oath) wrote about the connection between illness and the seasons. But 2,400 years later, we still don’t have a clear-cut answer to whether weather affects joint pain.
Still, it’s not for lack of trying, as research studies on arthritis and weather abound.
Studies that used patients’ subjective measures of pain sometimes found links to changes in the weather — and sometimes did not. Some research found that pain increased when barometric pressure increased, while other studies found that it increased when pressure dropped.
One group of scientists determined that pain occurred only when both pressure and humidity changed, but others found no such link.
To try to make sense of the chaos, Stanford University researchers assembled a group of people with arthritis — all but one believed that the weather affected their symptoms — and studied them for 15 months. The researchers found no correlation between the amount of pain the subjects experienced daily and the weather, no matter what aspect of the weather the researchers considered.
Is it possible that the weather affects joint pain and that we just haven’t designed the right study or looked at precisely the right variable? Absolutely.
In fact, it’s something I’d like to take a closer look at. But right now, my back is killing me. Maybe it has something to do with these cooler temperatures.
