new study finds that, for people living with arthritis and other conditions that cause chronic pain, a certain kind of weather increases pain.

When someone tells you that they can feel bad weather in their bones, they may well be right.

Scientists, many at the University of Manchester, in the United Kingdom, have released the findings of a new study that exposes a link between chronic pain and humid, windy days with low atmospheric pressure.

The study is whimsically titled "Cloudy with a Chance of Pain." It also appears in the journal npj Digital Medicine.

A folk belief supported by science

"Weather has been thought to affect symptoms in patients with arthritis since Hippocrates," says lead study author Prof. Will Dixon, director of the Centre for Epidemiology Versus Arthritis, at the University of Manchester. "Around three-quarters of people living with arthritis believe their pain is affected by the weather."

The study included more than 13,000 people from all 124 of the U.K.'s postcode areas, though the researchers sourced the final dataset from 2,658 people who participated daily for about 6 months.

The participants were predominantly people with arthritis, though some had other chronic pain-related conditions, such as fibromyalgia, migraine, or neuropathy.

The researchers collected the data with a smartphone app that they had developed specifically for the study. Each participant used the app to report their pain levels daily, while the app recorded the weather in their area using the phone's GPS.

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