Preliminary findings from a mass participation study have indicated a link between weather conditions – specifically rain and lack of sunshine – and chronic pain.

Daily data inputted from over 9000 UK participants in The University of Manchester-led ‘Cloudy with a Chance of Pain’ project has been viewed at the halfway stage of the 18-month study; these early results suggest a correlation between the number of sunny days and rainfall levels and changes in pain levels.

Professor Will Dixon, who leads the study, spoke at the British Science Festival at on Wednesday 7 September about this novel study and the interim findings.

Members of the public who have long-term pain record their daily pain symptoms on a special app. The app also independently captures hourly weather conditions using the smartphone GPS, thus joining pain data with real-time local weather events. The study is still open to new participants and the researchers are keen to recruit as many people as possible who are willing to track their symptoms.

At the halfway stage the research team reviewed the interim data, looking specifically at data sets collected from participants in three cities – Leeds, Norwich and London.

Across all three cities, as the number of sunny days increased from February to April, the amount of time spent in severe pain decreased. However, the amount of time spent in severe pain increased again in June when the weather was wetter and there were fewer hours of sunshine.