Fibromyalgia: the link that only exists in the individual
A Dutch study found an effect of air pressure — but only individually, and only together with stress levels.
Most studies of weather and pain ask: is there a link on average? A study of fibromyalgia asked the question differently. It asked: is there a link for the individual person — and does it change with how stressed that person is?
The answer was yes, on both counts.
Lower pressure, more pain
Lower air pressure and increased humidity were significantly linked to higher pain intensity and greater pain unpleasantness among participants. That's not surprising in itself — it resembles what larger studies of other pain conditions have also found. The interesting part comes when you look at what lay behind the link.
Stress changes the effect
Only air pressure — not humidity or temperature — was linked to participants' stress levels. And stress level significantly moderated how much a drop in air pressure hurt: the higher the stress, the more strongly a pressure drop came through in the pain.
That means air pressure didn't act as a fixed, uniform factor for everyone. It acted as a factor whose strength depended on the individual person's state at that moment. Two people with the same diagnosis, exposed to the same pressure drop, could experience two different things — depending on how stressed they were.
The share of participants in the largest weather-and-pain project ever done who had fibromyalgia or chronic widespread pain as their diagnosis. In other words, the question concerns far more than just the 377 or 200 patients the individual studies have counted.
Druce et al., JMIR mHealth and uHealth, 2017Why this is an argument for measuring person by person
The study's conclusion points directly to air pressure affecting fibromyalgia pain at the individual level and in interaction with emotional factors. That's a different kind of finding from an odds ratio that holds on average for a thousand people. It's a finding that the effect itself varies — with time, with person, with stress level.
An average figure can never capture that. What it takes is holding a person's own pressure up against that same person's own entries, repeated over time, so that the pattern — if there is one — can emerge for that specific person. Among fibromyalgia patients, the belief that weather affects the pain is itself one of the factors linked to how weather-sensitive the pain is actually measured to be. That makes it even more relevant to measure than to assume.
Neither of these is advice about what to do about your fibromyalgia. It's an argument that the question — does the weather affect me? — can only be answered one person at a time.
Aneroid doesn't make a diagnosis and doesn't give treatment advice. The app can show what your own data points to for you specifically — and that includes the possibility that it points to nothing.
Sources
- "Blame it on the weather? The association between pain in fibromyalgia, relative humidity, temperature and barometric pressure." PLOS One (2019). Read
- Druce KL et al. (2017). "Recruitment and Ongoing Engagement in a UK Smartphone Study Examining the Association Between Weather and Pain: Cohort Study." JMIR mHealth and uHealth. Read