Observing the lives of nearly ten thousand people using smartphones have helped scientists to prove that the weather, especially Sunny and rainy days really affect the strength and frequency of the manifestations of chronic pain, what they said at the British science festival in Swansea.
When we finally prove that this linkage exists, people will have confidence in the fact that they are not imagining these pains, and now they can build their lives, given the impact of weather on their health. Of course, to understand how weather affects pain, we need more volunteers who would be willing to describe their feelings these days using a smartphone — said William Dixon (William Dixon) from the University of Manchester (UK).
Dixon and his colleagues for the first nine months of the experiment is called Cloudy with a chance of pain. In the framework they are trying to understand whether rheumatism, headaches and other types of chronic pain, which often complain of the elderly and some young people during rainy, damp weather or, on the contrary, the heat related to weather.
To implement this task, British doctors have developed a special app that constantly asks the proprietor about his health and passes this information to scientists along with current data on the weather in the place where there lives the participant of the experiment, using the GPS sensor.
The first interim analysis of data collected in the cloud, shows that the relationship between the weather and the frequency of symptoms of chronic pain do exist – for example, the British are less likely to have experienced similar feelings in February and April, when the number of rainy days was minimal, and the number of Sunny days, the maximum.
The opposite was observed in June, when Britain was struck by an epidemic of rain, and the Sun peeking from behind the clouds less than in previous months observations. All this, according to Dixon, indicates that the relationship between pain and weather, but he offers to wait for the completion of observations, which will last another 9 months.
