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posted by on Wednesday April 19 2017, @11:07AM   Printer-friendly
from the psychosomatics-unite dept.

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...


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  • (Score: 2, Interesting) by redneckmother on Wednesday April 19 2017, @04:16PM (2 children)

    by redneckmother (3597) on Wednesday April 19 2017, @04:16PM (#496388)

    When the barometer moves quickly, arthritics feel it - it doesn't matter if it's going up or down.

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  • (Score: 2) by bob_super on Wednesday April 19 2017, @05:02PM (1 child)

    by bob_super (1357) on Wednesday April 19 2017, @05:02PM (#496422)

    Then, why don't they put arthritic people in a barometric chamber for a week, and ask them to record when they think the pressure went up or down?

    You can even double-blind that.

    • (Score: 2) by AthanasiusKircher on Wednesday April 19 2017, @05:37PM

      by AthanasiusKircher (5291) on Wednesday April 19 2017, @05:37PM (#496436) Journal

      It has been done [wired.com], though that link only mentions a group of four patients for a study in a barometric chamber (obviously not enough for statistical significance; it's surprising if there have been no follow-ups to that). There have been a number of other studies that have correlated local weather conditions (specifically change in barometric pressure -- usually lowering -- and change in temperature -- usually going down) with pain reports.