You know the feeling: It starts pouring rain, your joints start aching and you think the two are connected. Unfortunately, new research hasn’t been able to confirm that there’s such a link.
It’s a common myth that changes in weather conditions like rainfall and rising levels of humidity exacerbate joint or back pain, especially for those with arthritis. Previous research has only led to mixed results.
For this study, published Wednesday in the BMJ, researchers looked at daily rainfall data and compared it to outpatient visits to a general physician regarding joint or back pain. They studied more than 1.5 million Medicare-insured Americans over the age of 65 between 2008 and 2012. Just 18 percent of these visits happened on rainy days.
They couldn’t find a link between these rainy days — not to mention the week of the appointment nor the week before it — and joint or back pain. This was true even after adjusting for data like patient age, sex, ethnicity and chronic diseases.
That’s not to say all hope is lost for those clinging to their beliefs. This phenomenon could be true for a single individual; this study just couldn’t prove it across millions of people.
“When someone exhibits any sort of event, it’s natural for human beings to try to impute patterns into what they’re feeling and observing what may or may not be there,” study author Dr. Anupam Jena, an associate professor at Harvard Medical School, tells U.S. News. “And in this particular case, it’s certainly possible. We can’t exclude that this is a real relationship.”
Limitations for the study included that researchers didn’t have enough information on over-the-counter painkiller use among patients that could have had an influence on the findings.
Jena suggests future research could use electronic health record data that might offer more granular measures of pain, or measure inflammation levels on rainy days of patients who have blood tests drawn in a hospital or clinic.
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There’s No Link Between Rainfall and Joint Pain, Study Says originally appeared on usnews.com
