From the DOE/Princeton Plasma Physics Laboratory
What began as a chat between husband and wife has evolved into an intriguing scientific discovery. The results, published in May in BMJ (formerly British Medical Journal) Open, show a “highly significant” correlation between periodic solar storms and incidences of rheumatoid arthritis (RA) and giant cell arteritis (GCA), two potentially debilitating autoimmune diseases. The findings by a rare collaboration of physicists and medical researchers suggest a relationship between the solar outbursts and the incidence of these diseases that could lead to preventive measures if a causal link can be established.
RA and GCA are autoimmune conditions in which the body mistakenly attacks its own organs and tissues. RA inflames and swells joints and can cause crippling damage if left untreated. In GCA, the autoimmune disease results in inflammation of the wall of arteries, leading to headaches, jaw pain, vision problems and even blindness in severe cases.
Inspiring this study were conversations between Simon Wing, a Johns Hopkins University physicist and first author of the paper, and his wife, Lisa Rider, deputy unit chief of the Environmental Autoimmunity Group at the National Institute of Environmental Health Sciences in the National Institutes of Health, and a coauthor. Rider spotted data from the Mayo Clinic in Rochester, Minnesota, showing that cases of RA and GCA followed close to 10-year cycles. “That got me curious,” Wing recalled. “Only a few things in nature have a periodicity of about 10-11 years and the solar cycle is one of them.”
Wing teamed with physicist Jay Johnson of the U.S. Department of Energy’s Princeton Plasma Physics Laboratory, a long-time collaborator, to investigate further. When the physicists tracked the incidence of RA and GCA cases compiled by Mayo Clinic researchers, the results suggested “more than a coincidental connection,” said Eric Matteson, chair of the division of rheumatology at the Mayo Clinic, and a coauthor. This work drew upon previous space physics research supported by the DOE Office of Science.
The findings found increased incidents of RA and GCA to be in periodic concert with the cycle of magnetic activity of the sun. During the solar cycle, dramatic changes that can affect space weather near Earth take place in the sun. At the solar maximum, for example, an increased number of outbursts called coronal mass ejections hurl millions of tons of magnetic and electrically charged plasma gas against the Earth’s magnetosphere, the magnetic field that surrounds the planet. This contact whips up geomagnetic disturbances that can disrupt cell phone service, damage satellites and knock out power grids. More importantly, during the declining phase of the solar maximum high-speed streams develop in the solar wind that is made up of plasma that flows from the sun. These streams continuously buffet Earth’s magnetosphere, producing enhanced geomagnetic activity at high Earth latitudes.
The research, which tracked correlations of the diseases with both geomagnetic activity and extreme ultraviolet (EUV) solar radiation, focused on cases recorded in Olmsted County, Minnesota, the home of the Mayo Clinic, over more than five decades. The physicists compared the data with indices of EUV radiation for the years 1950 through 2007 and indices of geomagnetic activity from 1966 through 2007. Included were all 207 cases of GCA and all 1,179 cases of RA occurring in Olmsted County during the periods and collected in a long-term study led by Sherine Gabriel, then of the Mayo Clinic and now dean of the Rutgers Robert Wood Johnson Medical School.
Correlations proved to be strongest between the diseases and geomagnetic activity. GCA incidence — defined as the number of new cases per capita per year in the county — regularly peaked within one year of the most intense geomagnetic activity, while RA incidence fell to a minimum within one year of the least intense activity. Correlations with the EUV indices were seen to be less robust and showed a significantly longer response time.
The findings were consistent with previous studies of the geographic distribution of RA cases in the United States. Such research found a greater incidence of the disease in sections of the country that are more likely to be affected by geomagnetic activity. For example, the heaviest incidence lay along geographic latitudes on the East Coast that were below those on the West Coast. This asymmetry may reflect the fact that high geomagnetic latitudes — areas most subject to geomagnetic activity — swing lower on the East Coast than on the opposite side of the country. While Washington, D.C., lies just 1 degree farther north than San Francisco geographically, for example, the U.S. capital is 7 degrees farther north in terms of geomagnetic latitude.
Although the authors make no claim to a causal explanation for their findings, they identify five characteristics of the disease occurrence that are not obviously explained by any of the currently leading hypotheses. These include the east-west asymmetries of the RA and GCA outbreaks and the periodicities of the incidences in concert with the solar cycle. Among the possible causal pathways the authors consider are reduced production of the hormone melatonin, an anti-inflammatory mediator with immune-enhancing effects, and increased formation of free radicals in susceptible individuals. A study of 142 electrical power workers found that excretion of melatonin — a proxy used to estimate production of the hormone — was reduced by 21 percent on days with increased geomagnetic activity.
Confirming a causal link between outbreaks of RA and GCA and geomagnetic activity would be an important step towards developing strategies for mitigating the impact of the activity on susceptible individuals. These strategies could include relocating to lower latitudes and developing methods to counteract direct causal agents that may be controlled by geomagnetic activity. For now, say the authors, their findings warrant further investigations covering longer time periods, additional locations and other autoimmune diseases.
###
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When I toured the Soviet Union in 1976 as an envoy from the US [on Protection of the Environment], I visited dozens of research institutes. Including an asylum for the insane [no kidding]. Its director claimed that the level of ‘agitation’ among the inmates peaked strongly when a solar sector boundary passed the Earth. She even suggested that we could use her data to fill in gaps in the spacecraft coverage of measuring the magnetic field of the solar wind.
Weird, and really cool to hear about. I would never have imagined this. What could be the causal agent? So bizarre.
Yes, one wonders how RA or GCA could possible affect the solar cycles it just seems weird. You know?
like Clouds affecting the cosmic radiation and things like that.
🙂
” What could be the causal agent?”
The causal agent of such delusions is typically confiatiom bias.
So Cassius was wrong. The fault IS in our stars.
I feel this disparages those not held in any asylum.
They might be as barking mad as anyone else, yet their agitation doesn’t reflect in the measurements ?
An obviously underfunded field of study.
At times WUWT seems to qualify as a bona fide asylum 🙂
People who may wish to pursue this line of research [e.g. using the number of comments per day as a measure of agitation level] can use my sector boundary list http://wso.stanford.edu/SB/SB.html
HEY!! I represent that statement! 😎
proves my point…
Glad to be of help.
See, the SMART ones do wear tinfoil hats………
Such fetching head gear especially on a sunny day.
Just wait till the “elf and safety” boys and girls get hold of this one!!!!!! We’ll all have to wear them HA HA
James Bull
Well maybe not tinfoil hats, but copper bracelets and/or magnetic ones.
It would really be a hoot if these so-called quack remedies accidentally were doing the right thing.
In any case, those of us with pains can still blame it on weather, only thing now it’s solar weather…
(Long-time WUWT reader/lurker here – I’m not crazy, and neither am I)…
Spurious correlations are fun: http://www.tylervigen.com/page?new=TRUE
And we certainly get our dose of entertainment right here at WUWT,
In 1976, Soviet “asylums” were used to hold dissidents — probably, the only sane people in the USSR.
Soviet authorities always welcomed flaming fools from the West who believed everything they were told.
Oh yes, “at times WUWT seems to qualify as a bona fide asylum,” especially when certain Leif Svalgaard comes here in a state of mental agitation.
Some would say they still hold dissidents … in this country as well.
It seems that I have just aroused another fool. Let me check. Oh yes, a sector boundary just went by.
So, Leif, how did that work out, you helping to protect the environment in the old USSR? I believe many scietists were alarmed at possible global cooling back in 1976. Then there was Chernobyl in 1986. Seems like they should have been getting some advice on nuclear facilitiy controls.
Presidents Nixon and Brezhnev entered an agreement back then about Protection of the Environment. As part of that, it was agreed that expert scientists from each country would visit the other country to learn/advise on the subject of the agreement. There were several [about 10] areas of concerns. One was Climate and the possible influence of the Sun [I was partly responsible for reviving that dead horse briefly back in the seventies], and scientists from each area of concern took part in the exchange, see e.g.
http://www.leif.org/EOS/Nature/261546a0-Olson-SSSR.pdf
And, indeed, global cooling was a concern back then. And there were other areas, like protecting Polar Bears and the like. Nothing new under the sun.
More on the Agreement [see page 427 about the Climate]:
http://www.leif.org/EOS/USSR-US-1976.pdf
Lief,
There was a guy named Dr. Iben Browning that I heard speak not too long after that time period who was warning of global cooling based upon vulcanic eruptions he was predicting due to planetary, lunar and solar alignments and the resultant gravitational forces they would cause. Predicted the 1990 New Madrid fault shake (gave it a 50/50 chance). He was considered a “climatologist” at the time by many. Ever run into him?
Good heavens, no.
Now I can speak with authority that ….. the “time” that a person is inflicted with the early symptoms of RA ……. and the “time” that a medical doctor diagnoses his/her condition as being RA, …….. can be several years.
RA is not like the measles, … its infliction/affliction status does not display itself after 8 to 1o days. Therefore I serious doubt that any medical doctors knows when his/her patient actually became inflicted with RA.
Now I’m fairly sure that I can “feel-it” whenever my RA “flares” up, ….. so maybe I ought to start keeping a diary of those “flare-ups” ….. to see if they correlate to the solar “flare-ups”.
NAH, I got better things to do.
Look through enough sets of data tables, and eventually you’ll find some that correlate. How many sets of disease incidence figures did they have to examine to find one with a ten-year cycle?
Except they claim they did just the opposite. They noticed a ten year period in cases and decided to compare them to the solar cycle.
It could still be a coincidence. That’s why you study it further. Make your predictions and gather data, and see how close you come. That’s SCIENCE.
Dr. John Cannell has persuasively argued that influenza is related to Vitamin D which in turn is related to sun exposure. In the primary article – Epidemic Influenza and Vitamin D (2006) – contains this quote:
Hope-Simpson was the first to note an association
between severe influenza epidemics and solar flare
activity [66]. In 1990, Hoyle and Wickramasinghe
confirmed the association but von Alvensleben dis-
puted it [67, 68]. Horgan [69] promptly derided the
observations, connecting them to viral invasions from
outer space, a theory Hope-Simpson dismissed in his
1992 book [3]. Since the controversy, science has
learned that solar flare activity increases high-altitude
ozone, which, in turn, absorbs more UVB radiation
thereby decreasing surface UVB [70]. Thus, para-
doxically, heightened solar activity reduces surface
UVB; presumably, average 25(OH)D levels would be
lower as well. Rozema et al. estimated the variations
in surface UVB radiation due to the solar flare activity
over the last 300 years and estimated that, beginning
in the eighteenth century, ‘the dose of surface UV-B
should be (about) 4% to 13% lower at maxima of
the 11-year solar cycle’ [71]. Although modest, such
reoccurring decreases in UVB radiation should trigger
reductions in average 25(OH)D levels, which, in turn,
could trigger nonlinear factors related to influenza infectivity.
Rheumatoid arthritis is related to vitamin D levels:
Hypovitaminosis D in recent onset rheumatoid arthritis is predictive of reduced response to treatment and increased disease activity: a 12 month follow-up study.
Di Franco M1, Barchetta I2, Iannuccelli C3, Gerardi MC4, Frisenda S5, Ceccarelli F6, Valesini G7, Cavallo MG8.
Author information
Abstract
BACKGROUND:
Vitamin D displays immunomodulatory activities and has been proposed as a potential player in the pathogenesis of rheumatoid arthritis (RA). A negative association between serum 25(OH) vitamin D levels and RA activity was demonstrated but longitudinal studies investigating the role of vitamin D levels in predicting RA activity and response to treatment are lacking. Therefore, this study was designed to test the hypothesis of an association between serum 25(OH) vitamin D levels at RA diagnosis and disease activity evaluated by clinimetric, laboratory and ultrasound (US) parameters and to detect the prevalence of remission and response to treatment after 12 months follow-up.
METHODS:
This is a longitudinal, retrospective study on data obtained from thirty-seven patients with early RA treatment-naïve. Serum inflammatory markers, auto-antibodies and 25(OH) vitamin D levels were obtained at baseline. Hypovitaminosis D was diagnosed for 25(OH) vitamin D levels < 20 ng/ml. Tender joint count (TJCs), swollen joint count (SJCs), Visual Analog Scales (VAS), Disease Activity Score (DAS) 28 score were assessed at baseline and 12 months after diagnosis. Joints synovitis and power-Doppler were evaluated at baseline and 12 months later.
RESULTS:
At baseline mean 25(OH) vitamin D levels were 24.4 ± 11.9 ng/ml; 35% of study subjects had hypovitaminosis D which strongly associated with higher RA activity and lower prevalence of remission and response to treatment (all p-values < 0.001). The percentage of patients not presenting a reduction of the US synovitis score after 12 months from diagnosis was significantly higher among patients with hypovitaminosis D than in those with normal serum 25(OH) vitamin D at baseline.
CONCLUSIONS:
In patients with early RA and basal hypovitaminosis D after 12 months follow-up reduction of disease activity and percentage of remission and response to treatment were significantly lower than those observed in patients with normal vitamin D levels. These results provide further support to the immunomodulatory action of vitamin D in RA and suggest a role of basal vitamin D status in the prediction of disease evolution. Vitamin D measurement and possibly vitamin D supplementation should be considered an additional option in the management of early RA patients.
PMID:
25887374
[PubMed – in process]
PMCID:
PMC4373034
Free PMC Article
What about the possible connection with melatonin?
Re the USSR and the science of unusual correlations:
It turns out that a large enough release of radiation will stamp out communism, although the effect is somewhat delayed, and begins to wear off after a few decades.
GED,
Mel had nothing to do with it. Trust me, I was with him at the time.
But that Dr. Iben Peenmahpants is looking highly suspicious to me as an agitator.
That’s how influenza got its name. The early astrologers/medicine men thought that the coughing and the sneezing was caused by the influence of the planets, hence they called it influenza. Today its known as the flu or the cold.
Sorry to take you literally if this is intended as a joke, but influenza and the common cold are quite different, originating in different families of virus.
The term ‘cold’ is the English translation of the Greek term for cold (as in temperature) and the terminology goes back to Hippocrates (460-370 BC), who related illness and heath to the four humours. The four constituents of the human body (blood, phlegm, back bile, yellow bile) were each related to climate, and people living in hot or cold climates were believed to have an excess of the humour related to that climate.
Phlegm, the cold wet humour, would be found in excess in Northern Europeans. When it was winter, an even greater excess of cold temperatures would result in greater outbreaks of the common cold, but the cold could hit at any time of year in cool northern climates.
Influenza is more linked to outbreaks in the fall and winter.
It strikes me that linking rheumatoid arthritis to solar flares in a sense resurrects the Hippocratic linkage of health and environment.
Correlation is not causation.
True. But causation requires correlation
As E.M. Smith likes to point out, correlation may not be causation, but it is a big arrow that says “Dig here!” How do you think anything gets figured out without someone, at sometime observing a pattern and wondering, “Are these connected?”
Nobody said it did.
However correlations can often help you narrow down where to look for causation.
yes..but..correlation is not causation.
Health, especially metabolism, is strongly dependent on the sun and the hormones, D and others, created by it in the body, as well as melatonin. An interesting blog that follows research in this area is “the poor misunderstood calorie”. In an interesting connection, he published this article today:
http://caloriesproper.com/sunlight-and-the-circadian-rhythms-in-your-skin/
URL? Link? Correlation coeffs? DATA?
Probably correlates to volcanic activity and precession of the lunar aspides as well.
Read the article yourself, here’s the abstract, you can find it on PubMed:
Epidemiol Infect. 2006 Dec;134(6):1129-40. Epub 2006 Sep 7.
Epidemic influenza and vitamin D.
Cannell JJ1, Vieth R, Umhau JC, Holick MF, Grant WB, Madronich S, Garland CF, Giovannucci E.
Author information
Abstract
In 1981, R. Edgar Hope-Simpson proposed that a ‘seasonal stimulus’ intimately associated with solar radiation explained the remarkable seasonality of epidemic influenza. Solar radiation triggers robust seasonal vitamin D production in the skin; vitamin D deficiency is common in the winter, and activated vitamin D, 1,25(OH)2D, a steroid hormone, has profound effects on human immunity. 1,25(OH)2D acts as an immune system modulator, preventing excessive expression of inflammatory cytokines and increasing the ‘oxidative burst’ potential of macrophages. Perhaps most importantly, it dramatically stimulates the expression of potent anti-microbial peptides, which exist in neutrophils, monocytes, natural killer cells, and in epithelial cells lining the respiratory tract where they play a major role in protecting the lung from infection. Volunteers inoculated with live attenuated influenza virus are more likely to develop fever and serological evidence of an immune response in the winter. Vitamin D deficiency predisposes children to respiratory infections. Ultraviolet radiation (either from artificial sources or from sunlight) reduces the incidence of viral respiratory infections, as does cod liver oil (which contains vitamin D). An interventional study showed that vitamin D reduces the incidence of respiratory infections in children. We conclude that vitamin D, or lack of it, may be Hope-Simpson’s ‘seasonal stimulus’.
Comment in
Re: epidemic influenza and vitamin D. [Epidemiol Infect. 2007]
Epidemic influenza and vitamin D. [Epidemiol Infect. 2007]
PMID:
16959053
[PubMed – indexed for MEDLINE]
PMCID:
PMC2870528
Free PMC Article
Influenza the word is interesting. It refers to the ‘influence’ of the planets.
Wrong paper there ;). Here’s the actual paper under discussion: http://bmjopen.bmj.com/content/5/5/e006636
Here’s the actual paper citation: S. Wing, L. G. Rider, J. R. Johnson, F. W. Miller, E. L. Matteson, C. S. Crowson, S. E. Gabriel. Do solar cycles influence giant cell arteritis and rheumatoid arthritis incidence? BMJ Open, 2015; 5 (5): e006636 DOI: 10.1136/bmjopen-2014-006636
And direct link: http://bmjopen.bmj.com/content/5/5/e006636
Well folks, when the Paris talks fail, this will be the new enviro-wacko campaign to stop solar flares.
Stop solar flares? I wonder what the greens will come up with that will do that?
…by an amazing coincidence, I bet socialism does it. >¿<
A solar flare tax. Of course the name of the Bill would be structured to be presented as beneficial to the public.
Why not? Logically, “Stopping Climate change” will require stopping the drift of continental plates but they think that is achievable. 😉
I propose building a shield made of green activists every time there is a solar flare.
Well, I hear tthat Bill Clinton wants to include sacrificing virgins – to him.
Tin foil hat anyone?
interesting, far from conclusive but well worth pursuing and congratulations on the researchers for spotting them.
But just one horrific thought: How long before we see a fake “cure” based on this?
Why wait? Isn’t wearing magnetic bracelets etc. considered therapeutic for arthritis? Google “magnets and arthritis” for 404,000 results.
I’m gonna make a fortune selling Tinfoil bodysuits to the Progressive antivaxers-antiGMO crowd with this one. My suits will incorporate my specially-designed, patent-pending magnetic shielding so no one but me can profit.
Special carbon fibers impregnated with copper in my suit will also shield them from WiFi, cell phone, and Bluetooth EM radiation that is also making for more dementia. The Left-leaning progressive mind seem especially vulnerable to this EM induced dementia, so marketing will be targeted to this
gulliblevulnerable group. Soon you’ll be able to visually pick out Progressives on a crowded street by their suits. For the > 1%’er Progressives, copper can be substituted out with either silver or gold… at the appropriate price points of course for the more fashion minded upper 0.1%ers.Tinfoil hats are so 70’s.
Bwah-ha-ha!!!
/sarc off
The Medicines and Healthcare Products Regulatory Agency announced that 8,228 young girls had suffered debilitating side effects from the HPV injection.
http://www.express.co.uk/life-style/health/581393/Tens-of-thousands-teen-girls-suffer-serious-illnesses-HPV-cervical-cancer-health-concerns
Thousands of teenage girls enduring debilitating illnesses after routine school cancer vaccination
http://www.independent.co.uk/life-style/health-and-families/thousands-of-teenage-girls-enduring-debilitating-illnesses-after-routine-school-cancer-vaccination-10286876.html
“Bwahaha”
Your appeal to ridicule fallacy restored my blind faith in vaccines.
The HPV vaccine will save the lives of many hundreds of thousands of women over the next 50 years. Short-term illness (fever, rash) that goes away or death from a nasty cancer (think Farrah Fawcett).
If teen-age boys would take it, it would prevent many tens of thousands of laryngeal and throat cancers cases over the coming decades as well.
Vaccines save lives. At least in the US, the anti-vaxers are largely of a Liberal-Progressive ideology phenomenon (the discredited autism link). That’s to a large extent the same gullible group that willingly and uncritically accepts the Climate Change lies based purely on ideology. Something about the human brain organization allows the Liberal mind to be more gullible of pseudoscience claims and also be more accepting of government control of their lives (security) over individual freedom.
Wait 40 years and thousands of those girls would have contracted cancer.
I’m an Aussie and we’ve been inoculating our women for years now. We prefer them healthy and without cancer.
Titanium breast cups.
That’s the thing. Could look absolutely gorgeous if machine turned..
http://www.iphoneforums.net/attachments/ist2_53925-machine-turned-metal-finish-jpg.94/
Prefer turning them by hand
And here’s another quote from Cannell et al 2006:
Global weather changes are associated with El
Nino/Southern Oscillation (ENSO) [63]. Viboud
et al. found an average of 3.7 million influenza cases in
France during the 10 cold phases of ENSO but only
1.8 million cases during the eight warm phases [64].
The same authors reported that cold ENSO phases
are associated with colder temperatures in Europe.
Colder temperatures should lower mean serum
population 25(OH)D levels by lessening outdoor
activity and necessitating more clothes when out-
doors. Ebi et al. studied six Californian counties and
found that hospitalizations for viral pneumonia
peaked around the winter solstice in all six counties
[65]. They also found hospitalizations increased
30–50% for every 5 degrees F (3 degrees C) decrease in minimum
temperatures in four counties and increased 25–40%
for every 5 degrees F (3 degrees C) decrease in maximum tempera-
tures in the other two.
We live in the world. We’re affected by the world.
Maybe, maybe, they noticed something that is significant.
I don’t know.
Too bad that so many funds are being directed to support a hypothesis of what would happen but hasn’t instead of being available to check out if there is something to things like this.
If this were climate science they would have claimed that arthritis causes solar cycles.
It is the main driver… although there may be other feedbacks.
Not surprising. It has already been shown that a number of immune system functions are up-regulated by exposure to low-level radiation. And these are both autoimmune diseases, in which the immune system is overactive.
Not so much overactive, just turned on to attacking the “self”. The treatment is often suppressing the immune system with drugs. In the case of MS, for instance, you take the T-cell counts down to what would almost be considered borderline aids levels.
…“highly significant” correlation between periodic solar storms and
incidencescoincidences of rheumatoid arthritis (RA) and giant cell arteritis (GCA)…Autoimmune diseases have no known large scale correlation with anything except maybe genetic predisposition. I should know, since my mother died of one (MS) and my sister is permanently disabled by another (lupus). Look at the small N over the long time frame , and then cite the statistical significance of this patheticaly speculative study. More Cargo Cult science, pleading for additional funding to produce more wooden headphone replicas.
Said with a heavy heart, since had the utmost respect for Mayo (have collaborated with them since the mid 1990’s) and Hopkins. Until now.
Not all autoimmune diseases are created equal, and they most certainly do not have the same sources/causes.
You are most certainly right about the varying underlying causes of the many crippling autoimmune diseases (MS, lupus, Crohn’s, several versions of psoriasis, three forms of RA, even anaphalactic shock (peanuts, bee stings). None of which have any obvious or non-obvious connections to solar cycles.
As for the vitamin D and melatonin RA hypotheses, both food supplements are available in gross excess quantities OTC. I have used melatonin pills for decades to mitigate jet lag (used to commute to Europe ~15x/year, plus Asia (Japan, China, Singapore) ~4x/year). If there was an autoimmune/D or melatonin connection, a simple double blind experiment could have sussed it out long before now. Nobody has done so.
Nobody will, for two reasons. First, not patent protected. Second, illogical based on all the massive anecdotal evidence that RA suffers do not improve on jet lagged transcontinent trips aided by melatonin. Vitamin D supplements do not alleviate RA symptoms. Many RA suffers already take D supplements, since cannot get enough out and about in the sun. Not to mention that latitudinal Vitamin D differences have no statistical correlation to RA symptoms. No differences between Minnesota and Florida.
“ristvan
June 16, 2015 at 4:59 pm
…versions of psoriasis…”
I suffer from this. It is genetic and largely stress induced. I had no evidence of the condition until after 2009. Reminds me of the TV show in the UK called “The Singing Detective” and how the condition caused bouts of insanity.
Let me add this real life experience. My sister has a severe case of RA. It kind of runs on my father’s side of the family. Knowing this, as I started to exhibit RA symptoms in my left wrist I had to fight with my doctor to perform the blood test for RA. His protocol was to go through orthopedics first and seek treatment that way. Only through my insistence did he finally relent and did the RA test. Now the RA factor wasn’t quite there yet but the CCP markers were quite high, an indication that, according to my Rheumatologist, I was for sure going to get full blown RA. He started me on Methotrexate weekly and that has relieved the symptoms. I will remain on this medication for the rest of my life to prevent the onset of RA. I was fortunate that I knew my family history and we caught the disease before there was any damage to my joints.
As my rheumatologist says, I have a genetic disease. My diet, my activities, my lifelong exposure to sunlight and other environmental conditions have nothing to do with it. I can attest to that as the only changes I have had to make are to stop drinking alcohol as the methotrexate is harsh on my liver and kidneys. I have changed foods, eliminated and then re-added others constantly testing to see if any of that mattered. After more than two years I found that it doesn’t. We even gradually lowered the dose of the methotrexate in order to find the smallest effective dose and I found that once we hit too low of a dose the symptoms came back. Raising the dosage again stopped the symptoms. (for the record methotrexate takes several weeks to start working and several weeks to be eliminated from the body enough to cause a recurrence of symptoms.)
I constantly encourage those with joint pain to get an RA test. It may not be RA or pre-RA but if it is you can prevent a lot of future pain and joint deterioration by starting treatment as early as possible.
From Wikipedia entry for melatonin: “It is principally blue light, around 460 to 480 nm, that suppresses melatonin, proportional to the light intensity and length of exposure.” How does the flux of light in this energy range vary during the solar cycle?
wonder if fibromyalgia (since its also so weather dependent) affected by this.
I know using more vit d helps with it for me.
interesting.
I may have to see if my Crohn’s (another autoimmune disease) flares up with solar activity. And oddly the two bad bouts of clinical depression I have suffered were about 11 years apart.
Presented without further comment, an article from BMJ of March 11, 1911: http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2333553/pdf/brmedj07821-0008.pdf
George Devries Klein, PhD, PG, FGSA
June 16, 2015 at 3:13 pm
“Well folks, when the Paris talks fail, this will be the new enviro-wacko campaign to stop solar flares.”
=================
Is this the same person that added those letters “PhD, PG, FGSA ” under another name 2-3 weeks ago, and added just as much to the conversation ?
I thought so.
[??? .mod]
This research itself is not reproducible. I’ve tried to get patient data similar to this (but for other conditions) from US insurance companies and the Danes. Everyone who has such data wants scads of money for even a simple search.
Do we have any researchers @ur momisugly WUWT from Denmark want to take a look at this hypothesis and see? I dont’ believe Danish researchers need to pay for Danish national patient info.
I doubt that the Mayo Clinic is going to make their patient data available without cost to question one of their papers. Also, the Mayo clinic patient database is not really large enough to conclude on rare conditions. Insurance companies, on the other hand, have enormous databases; certainly enough to falsify this hypothesis.
I hope this is not a researcher taking after the examples of warmists claiming man-made global warming causes everything bad.
I would need to see this research independently reproduced, maybe several times before accepting it as anything more than “news of the weird.”
Looks like TedL already covered vitamin D deficiency. Very common. Cold weather = more clothes piled on exposing skin to the sun less often = lower vitamin D level. Vitamin D plays a MAJOR role for proper immune system function. http://www.vitamindcouncil.org/health-conditions/
This article is free to read and provides an overview of recent science on relationship of Vitamin D and rheumatoid arthritis.
Iran J Med Sci. 2014 Sep;39(5):476-9.
Investigating the levels of serum vitamin d in patients with rheumatoid arthritis referred to rasoul-akram hospital during 2011-2012.
Fakharan M1, Haghighi A2, Arabi M1, Loghman M1.
Author information
Abstract
Vitamin D3 has a role in many autoimmune diseases and appears to play a function in controlling Rheumatoid Arthritis (RA). The aim of this study is to evaluate the relationship between serum level of vitamin D and RA disease activity score. The serum level of vitamin D in 75 RA patients referred to the rheumatology clinic of Rasoul-Akram hospital was measured. Patients were classified into low, moderate and high RA activity groups based on the DAS-28 criteria (Disease Activity Score in 28 joints) and the mean values of serum vitamin D were compared between the three groups. The mean serum levels of vitamin D in high activity group (17.057±7.7 mg/ml) was significantly less than moderate (30.5±11.3 mg/ml) and low (36.7±19.5 mg/ml) activity groups (P<0.001). The outcome of this study shows that serum level of vitamin D is inversely correlated with the activity of RA.
KEYWORDS:
Iran; Rheumatoid arthritis; Vitamin D
PMID: 25242848[PubMed]
PMCID: PMC4164897
Free PMC Article