What Heat Waves Do To Chronic Pain

As the world heats up, there’s been a lot in the news not just about the record-breaking temperatures each year, and there’s also been a fair bit written about the effects of extreme heat, and especially prolonged extreme heat, on the human body.

For example: How Does Extreme Heat Affect Your Body?

And the more practical: How extreme heat can affect you—and how you can protect yourself

But what’s this about heat waves and chronic pain? Isn’t it supposed to be cold damp weather that does that?

Too hot to handle

First of all, the “cold damp weather” thing is contested: No, your aches and pains don’t get worse in the cold. So why do we think they do?

Hot weather, on the other hand? Now you’re definitely cooking.

More prosaically, researchers (Dr. Feino Sun & Dr. Kai Zhang) followed 35,152 U.S. adults aged 50+ from 1998–2022, linking chronic pain reports with local temperature data.

There were some interesting and superficially conflicting results, which make sense once we examine them:

• Extreme heat overall: sustained extreme heat was not significantly associated with high-impact chronic pain reporting across the overall population.
• Rural residents in particular: cumulative extreme-heat exposure was associated with a higher incidence of high-impact chronic pain among rural adults.
• Lower-wealth adults, anywhere: older adults in the lowest wealth quartile also had a higher incidence of high-impact chronic pain with cumulative extreme-heat exposure.
• Higher-wealth adults, anywhere: among the wealthiest participants, extreme heat was associated with lower pain incidence than for the general population and greater recovery.

In other words: money can buy improved access to air conditioning, health care, and ways to avoid heat.

One last thing about this study: remember when we said the “cold damp weather” thing is contested? Well, this study does support extreme cold being a problem too, with 4% increases in chronic pain reporting—but that’s with long-term exposure to many extreme cold days, not “I went out for an hour and it was a bit cold today”.

In a similar vein, while heatstroke can kill quickly (see: Stay Safe From Heat Exhaustion & Heatstroke!), again the biggest issue for chronic pain (and other adverse chronic health conditions that may or may not be associated with chronic pain) is usually not so much the temperatures in the moment, unless exceeding a certain level, but rather when there are long periods of the nighttime temperatures not dropping below the 20s (Celsius) or 70s (Fahrenheit). See for example: Phoenix had 23 nights with lows in the 90s this summer — more than triple the average ← this is bad

You can read the paper in full, here: Long-term exposure to extreme temperature and high-impact chronic pain among middle-aged and older U.S. adults

Which may add important context to findings like these: Pain Trends Among American Adults, 2002–2018: Patterns, Disparities, and Correlates ← the graph says it all, here

Want to learn more?

We’ve written quite a bit about pain management, including:

• Before You Reach For That Tylenol…
• How To Stop Pain Spreading
• How To Dial Down Your Pain
• Managing Chronic Pain (Realistically!)
• Get The Right Help For Your Pain
• The 7 Approaches To Pain Management
• Science-Based Alternative Pain Relief (When Painkillers Aren’t Helping, These Things Might)

Take care!