THE ASSOCIATION BETWEEN EXTERNAL WEATHER CONDITIONS AND PAIN AND STIFFNESS IN WOMEN WITH RHEUMATOID-ARTHRITIS

Objective. To determine the self-reported prevalence of weather sensit ivity in a sample of female patients with rheumatoid arthritis (RA), a nd to determine if there is objective evidence of associations between weather and pain and stiffness in female patients with RA. Methods. F ifty-three female patients residing in the Sydney metropolitan area pa rticipated in a study on the psychological determinants of disability from 1985 to 1987. During the study, subjects recorded pain on a visua l analog scale and duration of morning stiffness for 14 day periods at 3-4 monthly intervals over 1-3 years (X = 15.7 months). After complet ion of the study, data on weather conditions were collected from the B ureau of Meteorology for the days that pain and stiffness records were made. Descriptive statistics and autoregression were used to analyze the data. Results. Sixty percent of subjects reported that they were s ensitive to weather. Six weather variables made a statistically signif icant contribution to daily pain score (p < 0.0001). However, they acc ounted for only 2.5% of the variance. Two weather variables contribute d to duration of morning stiffness (p < 0.0001), but again these varia bles accounted for only a small portion of the variance (1.1%). A sepa rate analysis for pain was carried out on the data from subjects who r eported being weather sensitive. The results were consistent with thos e of the other analyses, with 2 variables accounting for only 1.7% of the variance (p < 0.0001). Conclusion. On the basis of these results i t appears that weather makes only a minimal contribution to pain and s tiffness in women with RA. The study may have been limited by its use of static measures of weather variables and pain. Further research usi ng dynamic measures of pain and weather and a more extensive range of weather variables is needed.