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For more than two thousand years people have believed that joint pain could be triggered by bad weather, but the link has never been proven.
But now, by harnessing the power of thousands of volunteers, doctors hope to unravel the mystery. And the new technique could offer countless solutions to a whole host of ailments.
[...] Each day she enters information about how she feels into an app on her phone, the phone's GPS pinpoints her location, pulls the latest weather information from the internet, and fires a package of data to a team of researchers.
On its own Becky's data is of limited interest, but she isn't acting alone. More than 13,000 volunteers have signed up for the same study, sending vast quantities of information into a database - more than four million data points so far.
The app, called "Cloudy with a Chance of Pain" is part of a research project being run by Will Dixon. He is a consultant rheumatologist at Salford Royal Hospital and has spent years researching joint pain.
My rheumatism is triggered when the wife asks me to carry heavy, heavy things up to our 3rd-floor walk-up...
(Score: 2) by Covalent on Wednesday April 19 2017, @03:13PM (1 child)
...and depression can cause pain, or at least an increased perception of pain.
That might be what's happening here, not an actual physiological response.
Also, it this were true, injured people in the rainforest would be in nearly chronic pain, wouldn't they?
You can't rationally argue somebody out of a position they didn't rationally get into.
(Score: 2, Insightful) by Farmer Tim on Wednesday April 19 2017, @07:59PM
There's a simple mechanical explanation which fits this: joints are cushioned by synovial fluid, limbs are more subject to changes in temperature than the body core, and as we well know temperature affects the density (and hence volume) of fluids. Conceivably barometric pressure could also change the density of the synovial fluid relative to the surrounding muscle and bone, as it's less dense. In rheumatoid arthritis the synovial membrane is inflamed; that inflammation is the critical part here, since it causes sensitivity to changes in shape (that much is definite).
This could be confirmed or debunked with MRI scans taken at different air pressures and temperatures, but that would be too expensive to justify without a statistically significant positive correlation indicating it isn't psychological, which is precisely why this survey is being done.
Came for the news, stayed for the soap opera.