Abstract

Background: The objective of this study was to evaluate weather’s effect on fibromyalgia symptoms as measured by the Revised Fibromyalgia Impact Questionnaire (FIQR) and the Brief Pain Inventory (BPI), which had not been reported previously.

Methods: 67 patients with fibromyalgia from the Ohio State University Rheumatology clinic were recruited for the study. We received survey results back from 30 patients. Patients were given questionnaires for the FIQR and BPI to fill out for 7 consecutive days. Data was collected from February 1, 2015 through February 7, 2015. We recorded daily weather parameters (temperature, humidity, and barometric pressure) for Columbus Ohio from the National Weather Service website beginning on January 31, 2015 to February 8, 2015. Linear correlations between the weather parameters, FIQR, and BPI were done using Pearson correlation coefficient. Analysis of covariance (ANCOVA) was used to correlate each patient trend with the weather parameters. Finally, principal component analysis (PCA) was used to recognize patterns in our data.

Results: We found no significant effect of weather on fibromyalgia symptoms using ANCOVA as measured by FIQR and BPI. PCA showed weak significant correlations between the second and the third principal components with the barometric pressure (0.26) and the humidity (-0.15), respectively.

Conclusion: We did not find any statistically significant effect of weather on fibromyalgia symptoms as measured by FIQR and BPI. PCA of the FIQR and BPI showed low correlation with barometric pressure and humidity but they accounted for only 6.6% and 5% of the variability in our dataset, which are too low to extract strong conclusions from.

Keywords: Fibromyalgia; Weather; Barometric pressure