Does the weather affect CRPS?

My client Alice developed CRPS after falling at work and fracturing her wrist. Two years on, she says she doesn’t need the weather forecast to tell her when a significant change in the weather is due. She describes heatwaves as “awful”, but for her, it’s cold spells that she particularly dreads:

“I can feel the cold in the bones from my wrist to the tips of my fingers and the pain is just off the scale. It doesn’t matter if it’s warm inside. I can be sweating all over but my wrist and hand are icy cold to touch.”

And Alice isn’t alone. It’s difficult to find a person living with CRPS – or indeed most chronic pain conditions – who isn’t a human barometer. However, while most sufferers experience noticeable changes in their symptoms with the weather, particularly extremes of weather, a scientifically proven link remains elusive.

The science

A few years ago, researchers at the University of Manchester set out to analyse the results of numerous studies published on weather affecting chronic musculoskeletal pain. Such a meta-analysis aims to gain a more reliable conclusion by combining data from multiple research papers.

They identified a whopping 4,707 studies that were broadly on topic and carefully sifting through those revealed 43 similar enough to warrant inclusion. Given the extensive anecdotal evidence, it should be no surprise that they “found some association between pain and a weather variable” in 67% of the studies. The most common variables were:

• precipitation;
• atmospheric pressure; and
• relative humidity.

However, no single weather variable was consistently associated with pain, and several studies’ results directly conflicted. For example, one study established a direct link between temperature and pain, while another found no association.

So, does the weather affect CRPS?

The authors concluded that “existing studies of the association between weather and pain do not yet provide conclusive evidence to confirm or deny such a relationship.”

However, they then set out recommendations for future research to “hopefully make future studies more effective in characterising the association between weather and pain.”

For what it’s worth, I believe the overwhelming anecdotal evidence speaks for itself – extremes of weather clearly affect the symptoms of CRPS. But maybe part of the problem in scientifically establishing a link is that the weather affects people so differently.

See also: CRPS vs FND