New research from across the pond shines some light on the correlation between some weather patterns and expression of chronic pain.
For their study, researchers conducted a study called the Cloudy Project that involved more than 9,000 patients with chronic pain. Each day, patients would track their levels of daily pain through a smartphone app. When pain levels were entered, the app also recorded the local weather at that date and time. Patients recorded their pain levels for a total of 18 months.
Pain and the Rain
After looking at the data, researchers uncovered a link between poor weather and greater expression of pain. As the cold winter months turned to spring and the sun was up longer and more often, researchers noticed that pain levels dropped and severe pain was experienced far less frequently. They also noticed that pain levels spiked again during a rainy stretch in June. Researchers said there certainly is a correlation between chronic pain expression and the weather, but they want to conduct future studies to better understand why this correlation exists.
“Once the link is proven, people will have the confidence to plan their activities in accordance with the weather,” said Will Dixon, a professor of digital epidemiology at Manchester’s School of Biological Sciences. “In addition, understanding how weather influences pain will allow medical researchers to explore new pain interventions and treatments.”
Dixon called for individuals with chronic pain to reach out to the Cloudy Project about the chance to participate in future studies and help medical researchers better understand the mechanisms behind chronic pain.
“To work out the details of how weather influences pain, we need as many people as possible to participate in the study and track their symptoms on their smartphone,” Dixon said. “If you are affected by chronic pain, this is your chance to take do something personally — and easily — to lead to a breakthrough in our understanding of pain.”
The majority of people will deal with chronic or nagging pain at some point in their life, and new estimates suggest that 1 in 10 adults will be diagnosed with chronic pain every year. Even though these numbers are really high, as a society, we’re not doing a very good job of solving the problem of chronic pain.
Even when chronic pain is managed and controlled, it can lead to other issues. When you’re constantly dealing with physical pain, it can be mentally and emotionally exhausting, and the same can be said in the inverse. If you aren’t in the right mindset, it can be difficult to stay active and really work towards preventing chronic pain.
Recently, a new study decided to take a closer look at the connection between chronic pain and mental health – more specifically, depression and chronic pain. For their study, researchers out of the University of Edinburgh in the United Kingdom examined physical and mental health assessments of more than 100,000 individuals.
Depression and Pain
After looking at the findings, researchers uncovered:
People who have partners with depression were more likely to experience chronic pain.
A person whose spouse was depressed had an 18.7 percent increased risk of suffering from chronic pain.
Also of note, having a parent with chronic pain increased a person’s likelihood of developing chronic pain by 38.4 percent.
“We hope our research will encourage people to think about the relationship between chronic pain and depression and whether physical and mental illnesses are as separate as some believe,” researchers wrote.
At the end of the day, this research shines a little more light on another potential avenue for chronic pain management. Sometimes we need to go beyond the root source of the pain and look at environmental and other contributing factors. If we can improve our mental health and the mental mindset of those around us, we might be able to reduce the number of people who have to battle chronic pain on a daily basis.
A newspaper headline read this week, “1 in 3 Medicare Patients took Opioids” in the last year. Is that as big a deal as the headline made it out to be? Probably not. If one starts to think about the article and read the whole story, it becomes ridiculous. The study being cited actually reports that 1 in 3 Medicare recipients overall received at least one prescription for an opioid medication in the last year. The article and the study indicated this was a major problem.
Some facts should be thought about when analyzing such a study. First, one in three people suffers from chronic pain. Further, chronic pain tends to be more common in the elderly and disabled, the very population that has Medicare. One prescription within a year’s time is probably not significant. Many people have significant medical procedures within one year, including dental procedures, numerous outpatient surgeries, or even painful diagnostic studies. Others have injuries that may be extremely painful for several days. The common thread is that all these things are appropriate for short-term opioid use to control pain. Obtaining one prescription within a year for a third of all Medicare patients would probably be very normal.
Interpreting The Stats
The focus of the study and the article is to emphasize how bad and problematic are opioids. If one stops and thinks for a second, making that conclusion on the basis of “1 in 3 Medicare patients have received a prescription for opioids in one year” is terrible. Acute pain is exactly what opioids are best used to treat, especially for just a few days. It would not be surprising to find out that 1 in 3 Medicare patients had a significant medical procedure for which an opioid was prescribed.
A more devastating fact should be that 1 in 3 people suffer from chronic pain. The causes of pain are extremely varied. The headlines of the paper are all about addiction. There are very few about how widespread pain is a problem. The big alarm is about death related to drug abuse. Addicts are obtaining billions of dollars for further treatment and research from the government. There are no headlines about how people struggle day to day with dealing with pain and still trying to continue with life.
Addiction to opioids and the increases in deaths is a problem. The solution in reality is probably to treat the true problem, which is the pain. Better pain medications that are not addictive definitely are needed. Research in the basic science of pain and how to prevent it is needed even more.
As we’ve said in a bunch of previous blogs, there’s no “magic pill” to cure all your symptoms associated with chronic pain. It takes hard work on the patient’s end and a medical team dedicated to finding the right solution. It’s not going to be easy, but it will be worth it.
Recently, I read a story about one family’s plight with chronic pain and felt compelled to share it. Originally posted in the New York Post, Michelle Makin pens a piece about how one family has battled through the troubles associated with chronic pain, learning the lesson we preach – that’s there’s no magic pill, but solutions are in reach.
A Daughter’s Battle Against Chronic Pain
As Veronica marks her 16th birthday this month, we are sharing an update in hopes of de-stigmatizing and demystifying life with chronic pain, fatigue and other undiagnosed chronic illnesses.
It’s been a year since Veronica lay bedridden, unable to breathe normally, felled by a mysterious combination of neurological and physiological complications that dozens of doctors couldn’t quite pinpoint. We thought we had a definitive answer when she was diagnosed with Tourette syndrome last July. But it turned out to be the tip of a medical iceberg.
Though her alarming bout with ‘‘air hunger” dissipated and she willed herself back to school part-time, she could still barely make it through each day. Despite normal blood tests, her exhaustion, brain fog, migraines and weight loss made it nearly impossible to function.
If you’ve suffered from chronic illness, you know the social ostracism that comes with it. ‘‘It’s all in your head,” ‘‘Stop being so dramatic” and ‘‘You don’t look sick” are some common responses from armchair doctors.
For teens, the isolation is wrenching. Veronica lost almost all of her ‘‘friends” last summer — too shallow or self-absorbed to care or comprehend her condition. Depression set in. We were losing her to an abyss of hopelessness.
Then came the Mayo Clinic. The renowned Rochester, Minn., practice runs a Pediatric Pain Rehabilitation Center for adolescents and young adults with chronic illnesses. It’s basically a three-week boot camp to equip young patients and their families with skills to get their lives back through cognitive-behavioral therapy, physical therapy, occupational therapy and recreational therapy.
We learned that Veronica’s basket of seemingly random co-morbidities is common among those diagnosed with dysautonomia, postural orthostatic tachycardia syndrome, hypermobility and pain-amplification syndrome. Her brain and body are wired differently; the triggers are unpredictable. We learned that the ‘‘what” of Veronica’s symptoms didn’t matter as much as the ‘‘how” to help her cope day to day.
There are no magic pills. It’s a tough-love crash course in hard work, personal responsibility and mind over matter. I’m not exaggerating when I say some patients enter the program in wheelchairs or on crutches — and leave on their own two feet with the ability to walk or even run after months or years of inactivity. The goal isn’t to eliminate pain or cure sickness, but to restore functionality.
For Veronica, exposure to and bonding with other teens saddled with similar conditions — and in some cases, much worse — was life-changing. It’s one thing to be told by a specialist ‘‘you’re not alone.” It’s another to join a family of survivors riding the chronic-illness roller coaster together.
Since completing PPRC last fall, Veronica has had more good days than bad. She didn’t let her migraines, second shoulder surgery for subluxation, severe joint pain or OCD stop her from finishing her sophomore year of high school. She has remained close to several of her fellow PPRC grads and made new friends at home.
She received a lot of help along the way. A caring counselor helped her become an athletic trainer at her school, which enabled her to rebuild her social life.
Mental-health professionals successfully treated her OCD and depression using a combination of medication and exposure therapy — an agonizing but effective treatment that required her to confront her fears. Gifted physical therapists continue to treat her joint pain and train her to manage it.
One of the most intriguing aspects of PPRC is the mandate to stop dwelling on symptoms. Talking and thinking about pain or fatigue all the time reinforces the neural pathways for pain and fatigue.
Instead, we focus on the small triumphs each day. We measure life, to borrow blogger Christine Miserandino’s famous analogy, by the spoonful: getting up on time, being able to walk on the treadmill for 10 minutes, completing simple chores, eating well, having a good laugh, breathing free and easy.
So, how’s Veronica doing? The short answer is that she’s doing — and that’s a gift we never take for granted. Happy birthday, my sweet 16 badass. Per aspera ad astra.
I try to skim the medical news every couple of days to see what’s making waves in the field of pain management. Most of what I see has to do with a variety of topics related to musculoskeletal medicine and pain.
A lot of articles I see have limited value to my current practice, but some topics have interest because there is science that may be important if it is applied in a more broad way. Other things are interesting because they are rooted in obvious facts.
Last week, the Star Tribune had an item on cancer prevention. JAMA Oncology had an article that 63 percent of men’s cancer and 41 percent of women’s cancer was preventable. The interesting thing was that if we just lived a healthy lifestyle, a lot of cancers would not occur. The obvious is the simple stuff, like not smoking and wearing sunscreen. The other aspects are a bit tougher, like eating healthier foods, not being obese, exercising, and sleeping adequately. It is a potent reminder of how we live life significantly impacts our overall health. The best way to cure cancer is to prevent cancer in the first place.
Another article in the paper was on baby powder causing cancer. The most common cancer was ovarian, but lung cancer may also be linked. The connection to cancer is that baby powder is a very fine particulate. It is also very similar to asbestos. If these fine particles get inside the body, they can cause immune reactions and stimulate abnormal tissue growth as well as cancer. So a supposedly harmless substance we use can cause deadly problems.
Take Away Points
There is a message here from these news pieces about cancer that applies to all of us. The first is that if we work at keeping ourselves healthy, we will have less illness and medical problems. Secondly, keeping compounds that naturally do not belong in our bodies out helps prevent cancer.
Applying this logic to pain management is natural. Let’s first look at the ideology of keeping ourselves healthy to prevent chronic pain. Exercises including stretching, strengthening and aerobically conditioning the body all help prevent pain. I used to be able to do parts of a program sporadically and function fairly well. As I have aged, consistency with a well-rounded program of exercise has been essential, as skipping days does not work well for me. Getting enough quality sleep is a problem; I have not yet focused on how I will try to improve my sleep. Eating healthy has been issue, but I am slowly changing my diet, lowering my carbohydrate intake, and concentrating on protein, vegetables, fruit and some cheese. I am trying to find a diet plan that makes sense and is sustainable.
The second point of focus is not adding things into my body that may not be healthy. That means keeping my medicine intake to what is necessary to prevent illness, such as taking cholesterol medicine (I have a familial variety of high cholesterol), and asthma medicine when needed. I keep away from addictive medicines. Overall, the most important aspect of health and pain control comes down to eating right, exercise, and good sleep. There is very little magic and a lot of personal work put in on my end, and my body thanks me for it.
New research from across the pond shines some light on the correlation between some weather patterns and expression of chronic pain.
