Does The Weather Affect Arthritis (cause of confusion)

Some people swear that weather makes their arthritis flare up. Others don’t seem to be affected at all.

And weirdly enough, different kind of weather appears to affect people’s arthritis in a different way.

So, what does the science say? In today’s article, we go over several studies on this subject and try to clear the confusion up once and for all.

In 2013, the journal Clinical Rheumatology published a study in which 245 arthritis patients visited a Madrid emergency room with arthritis pain 306 times between 2004 and 2007. When the weather conditions were examined, it turned out that those patients, all of whom were aged between 50 and 65, were 16 percent more likely to experience severe pain when it was cold.

But a 2014 study in Arthritis Care & Research on 993 people in Sydney, Australia found that the temperature, humidity, air pressure, wind speed, wind gust, wind direction, and rain did not appear to have any effect on the amount of back pain that their subjects experienced. These subjects did not have arthritis but complained of severe back pain at primary care clinics.

If you aren’t confused enough, a 2015 study in the Journal of Rheumatology, conducted on 810 European participants with osteoarthritis concluded that humidity definitely worsened arthritis pain, especially in cold weather. Cold weather alone had little effect. Moreover, for the pain to worsen, high humidity had to continue for a period of days. They couldn’t find a relationship between pain and daily humidity.

BMJ printed a study in 2017 in which researchers analyzed the medical information of 1,552,842 people who had visited clinics with back or joint pains. The subjects suffered from any condition like rheumatoid arthritis, osteoarthritis, spondylosis, intervertebral disc disorders, and so on.

They found no relationship between the pain and rain, and they did not test for temperature.

In 2016, British scientists thought they would sort through the muddle once and for all by using a smartphone app to collect data from the largest sample of participants ever. Participants submitted their self-assessed daily arthritis pain scores between January 2016 and April 2017, while the app recorded their location using GPS technology. The researchers could then compare the scores with the weather conditions.

With more than two million data pieces available, they performed a preliminary analysis which showed that the lack of sunlight and/or rain worsened arthritis pain for people in London, Norwich, and Leeds, i.e. the three cities they had examined.

So, you can see how the studies are all over the place. Indeed, the only thing that should matter in the end would be how you feel and what you experience during the different weather changes.

Fortunately, arthritis in any weather may be a thing of the past if you follow the 3 easy steps that are explained here…