NEW YORK (Reuters Health) - Although some people with fibromyalgia pain feel that the weather affects their symptoms, new study results suggest that changes in the weather do not predict changes in pain.

"The considerable day to day variation of fibromyalgic pain is not related to the weather," according to study authors Drs. Egil A. Fors of University Hospital of Trondheim and Harold Sexton of the Psychiatric Research Center for Finnmark and Troms, both in Norway.

"The reasons for the variation in the pain needs to be looked for elsewhere in the sufferer's life," the researchers said.

Fibromyalgia, a chronic condition estimated to affect 1% to 2% of individuals in the UK and the United States, is marked by pain in the muscles and around the joints and is often accompanied by depression and fatigue. The cause is unknown, but researchers have found pain-processing abnormalities in the spines and brain stems of some people with the condition.

In the study, Fors and Sexton looked at 55 female patients from the Norwegian Association of Fibromyalgia. For four weeks, each participant rated her daily pain on a scale of 0-100, from no pain to very severe pain. The results were compared with weather data obtained from the National Institute of Meteorology.

Overall, there was no obvious relationship between the weather and the patients' daily pain scores, Fors and Sexton report in the March issue of Annals of the Rheumatic Diseases. And patient pain--whether same day or previous day pain--did not appear to predict any changes in the weather.

In other findings, patients who had diagnosed fibromyalgia for fewer than 10 years were more sensitive to the weather in their next-day pain than were their peers who had the condition for 10 or more years.

"Why patients with (fibromyalgia) might be more sensitive to weather changes earlier in their illness than later is uncertain," Fors and Sexton write.

"Fibromyalgic sufferers might blame the weather because it is such a prominent feature of the daily life and because an association between the two is a widely held belief," the researchers speculate.

SOURCE: Annals of the Rheumatic Diseases 2002;61:247-250.

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