If you have ever heard the expression “mind over matter”, then for Professor Barton L. Wise, it might be closer to the truth than you may imagine. In a study into mental health and arthritic pain, it was found that pain flares are greater when mental health is poorer.
“Pain varies over time, both over extended periods and over shorter periods,” Wise said. “The same person can feel little or no pain in their knee or hip, and later they can feel moderate-to-severe pain even when the extent of damage to the knee or hip-joint as seen on x-ray imaging remains the same.”
Arthritis (or osteoarthritis) is caused when the tissue (cartilage) sitting between bone joints is attacked by the body’s immune system. The tissue is ground away, resulting in the bone painfully rubbing against one another. Whilst this is the overall cause of pain, Wise’s study into mental issues cast alongside arthritis has shown that the worse that an individual feels, the more exposed and vulnerable they are to other areas of pain.
Although the study didn’t consider extreme factors such as clinical depression, the study found that the emotional and mental state of the individual will affect the amount of pain that they endure. The difficulty lies in how varied the pain can be from patient to patient, with some barely feeling any aches and pains to those that cringe with every movement; however in this recent study, it implies that pain does not have to become you – at least not for long.
What this suggests is that there is hope: there will be a new path to uncover in dealing with arthritis and arthritic pain, especially in the avenues of new forms of therapy. If mental health can be improved, so too can the symptoms of osteoarthritis.
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