Society Logo
ME/CFS Australia Ltd
Please click here to donate ME/CFS South Australia Inc
 
 
Facebook
 
ME/CFS SOUTH AUSTRALIA INC

Registered Charity 3104

Email:
sacfs@sacfs.asn.au

Mailing address:

PO Box 322,
Modbury North,
South Australia 5092

Phone:
1300 128 339

Office Hours:
Monday - Friday,
10am - 4pm
(phone)

ME/CFS South Australia Inc supports the needs of sufferers of Myalgic Encephalomyelitis, Chronic Fatigue Syndrome and related illnesses. We do this by providing services and information to members.

Disclaimer

ME/CFS South Australia Inc aims to keep members informed of various research projects, diets, medications, therapies, news items, etc. All communication, both verbal and written, is merely to disseminate information and not to make recommendations or directives.

Unless otherwise stated, the views expressed on this Web site are not necessarily the official views of the Society or its Committee and are not simply an endorsement of products or services.

Become a Member
DOCX Application Form (Word, 198 KB)
Why become a member?

Rain and pain in Fibromyalgia

Thursday 6 June 2013

 

From DailyRx:

 

DailyRxRain and Pain in Fibromyalgia

By
Reviewed by: Chris Galloway, M.D.
June 3, 2013

Fibromyalgia pain and fatigue not truly linked to weather conditions

(dailyRx News) The weather can have a profound effect on people. But contrary to popular belief, the weather might not have much to do with worsening of pain and fatigue in people with fibromyalgia.

A recent study had patients with fibromyalgia keep a symptom diary for four weeks. The researchers compared those symptoms to the weather for each day.

The results of this study showed only small and inconsistent links between inclement weather and symptoms of fatigue or pain.

Ercolie Bossema, PhD, from the Department of Clinical and Health Psychology at Utrecht University in the Netherlands, led a study into symptom changes from weather conditions in people with fibromyalgia.

Fibromyalgia symptoms include chronic widespread pain, fatigue, cloudy thinking and increased sensitivity.

The authors estimated that roughly 92 percent of patients with fibromyalgia have reported that specific weather conditions worsen symptoms.

For this study, 333 adult women who had been diagnosed with fibromyalgia by a rheumatologist were asked to keep a symptoms diary for 28 straight days.

The researchers accessed detailed daily weather conditions from the Royal Netherlands Meteorological Institute. Measures of weather included the air temperature, minutes of sunshine, amount of rainfall, atmospheric pressure and relative humidity.

A total of 69 percent of the patients kept symptom diaries during an autumn month and 26 percent kept a symptom diary during a summer month. No diaries were kept during spring months. Only 5 percent of patients kept a symptom diary during a winter month.

At least some rainfall happened on 47 percent of the days in question.

The results of the study showed that after taking symptoms and weather variables into account, only 10 percent of the associations between pain or fatigue could be attributed to the weather.

On sunnier days, patients reported lower levels of pain symptoms. Patients reported more pain symptoms on days with higher levels of relative humidity.

The patients reported more fatigue symptoms on the day after a hot day. Fatigue symptoms were lower on the day after a humid day.

“A few significant but small and inconsistent associations were found [between weather and fibromyalgia symptoms],” the authors wrote.

“While individuals appear to be differentially sensitive to certain weather conditions [temperature, sunshine and humidity], there is no indication that specific patient characteristics play a role in weather sensitivity,” they wrote.

The authors did note that the findings in this study should not rule out the possibility that some individual patients with fibromyalgia could have weather-related symptoms.

This study was published in June in Arthritis Care & Research.

The Dutch Arthritis Association provided funding for this project. No conflicts of interest were declared.

Conditions: Fibromyalgia Neuromuscular Disease

Reviewed by: Chris Galloway, M.D.

Review Date: June 3, 2013

Citation: Arthritis Care & Research, “The Influence of Weather on Daily Symptoms of Pain and Fatigue in Female Patients With Fibromyalgia: a Multilevel Regression Analysis”

Last Updated: June 4, 2013

Source: dailyrx.com

 

The above originally appeared here.

 


Arrow right

More Fibromyalgia News

 


Arrow right

More Multimedia

 


 

blog comments powered by Disqus
Previous Previous Page