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WASHINGTON –– Looking to meet women, 20-year-old US college student Leland turned to mobile phone app Tinder, after a friend told him about his own successful exploits.

Leland’s results were mixed: He was matched with around 400 women over more than a year but only ended up meeting two, and one of them felt “awkward”.

“I get to experiment with ice breakers and pickup lines, so that aspect of it is pretty entertaining,” said Leland, a sophomore at a midwestern college. He asked that his full name not be used.

For now, Leland said he plans to stop using the app and go back to the old-fashioned way of meeting women, because “I don’t want to be known as that Tinder guy.”

Nonetheless, the use of mobile apps for meeting and dating is multiplying as people rely more on their smartphones as a daily hub. The apps can help people discover new friends in real time, based on the location pinpointed in their devices.

With apps like Tinder, prospective daters can see pictures of people who are nearby. If they see someone they like, they can swipe right to indicate interest. People who both swipe right on each other’s profiles can then contact each other.

Around 3 per cent of Americans have used mobile dating apps, while 9 per cent have tried traditional online dating websites, according to the Pew Research Centre.

Pew researcher Aaron Smith said dating app users “tend to be quite young, primarily people in their mid-20s or 30s” and very tied to their smartphones.

‘Digital Crush’

Julie Spira, author of a cyber-dating book and blog, said young people are most comfortable with mobile dating apps, which can speed up courtship and deliver “push notifications” of a so-called “digital crush”.

“People spend a lot of time checking e-mails or Facebook; it’s the first thing they look at when they wake up, so it makes a lot of sense to find love or friends or dates through the apps,” Spira told AFP.

SinglesAroundMe, among the first location-based dating apps, claims two million members in 100 countries around the world.

“One of the things women told me is they want to know where the single guys are,” said Christopher Klotz, founder and chief executive of the Canadian-based firm.

When SinglesAroundMe launched in 2010 “it seemed spooky to people” to use geolocation, but attitudes have evolved, Klotz said.

To ease security concerns, SinglesAroundMe developed technology which can mask or shift the location of users.

Another mobile app called Skout, which launched in 2007, calls itself the “largest global, mobile network for meeting new people” with 8 million members around the world, and says it facilitated over 350 million connections in 2013 alone.

Spokeswoman Jordan Barnes said Skout “is not just a dating app” because it helps facilitate professional relations and friendships as well as romantic encounters.

Barnes said Skout began as a website and shifted to mobile as smartphone use increased, and allowed people to connect based on location.

The app also has a “virtual travel” feature which enables users to find friends in a city they plan to visit.

“I think the digital age has changed people’s attitudes, it has taken the stigma away from meeting people online,” she told AFP.

Matching through Facebook

Hinge, a mobile app created by a startup in Washington, does not use geo-location but pulls information from users’ Facebook profiles to recommend matches.

“We think most people don’t necessarily want to meet someone where they just happen to be,” said Arjumand Bonhomme, head of engineering for Hinge.

By drawing from a user’s Facebook friends, likes, favorites and places, Hinge aims to introduce people who already share connections, often friends in common.

“Everyone we show is connected to you in some way. It is often someone you could have met at a house party or cocktail party,” Bonhomme told AFP.

To get around the problem of developing critical mass –– since people want to use the apps with the largest pools of users –– Hinge began by focusing on Washington, before launching in New York, Boston and San Francisco, with more cities to come.

NEW YORK — With 1.23 billion users in all the flavours and up-and-down stages of romantic relationships, Facebook knows a thing or two about love.

For example, two people who are about to enter a relationship interact more and more on Facebook in the weeks leading up to making their coupled status official — up until 12 days before the start of the relationship, when they share an average of 1.67 posts per day.

Then, their Facebook interactions start to decline — presumably because they are spending more time together offline. But while they interact less, couples are more likely to express positive emotions toward their each other once they are in a relationship, researchers on Facebook’s data science team found.

Touching on everything from religion to age differences, Facebook has been disclosing such light-hearted findings in a series of blog posts this week, with one coming up later Friday and another, on breakups, Saturday. Friday, of course, is Valentine’s Day.

Facebook data scientist Mike Develin, whose background is in mathematics, notes that the relationship stuff is sort a side project for his team, the findings geared more toward academic papers than Facebook’s day-to-day business. His “day job” is Facebook’s search function — how people use it, what they are searching for that isn’t available and how to make it more useful.

But the patterns Facebook’s researchers can detect help illustrate just how useful the site’s vast trove of data can be in mapping human interactions and proving or disproving assumptions about relationships. Can horoscopes predict lasting love? Forget about it.

“We have such a wide-ranging set of data, including on places there may not be data on otherwise,” Develin said, adding that because Facebook knows a lot about people’s authentic identity, there are “almost no boundaries” to the kinds of questions the researchers can explore — about the structure of society, culture and how people interact.

Someday, researchers studying Facebook data may be able to predict whether a couple will break up, learn whether people are happy together or see what makes relationships last. Of course, the data has its limits — not everyone is on Facebook and not every Facebook user shares everything on the site.

Still, people share quite a bit. When looking at breakups through the lens of changed relationship statuses (see: “Joe Doe is single”), the researchers found couples who split up and got back together — and dutifully documented it on Facebook — 10 or 15 times a year. The maximum, Develin, recalls, was a couple who went in and out of a relationship 27 times in one year. While one may assume that a couple wouldn’t want to broadcast so much relationship drama to the world, people actually “very faithfully update Facebook at each twist and turn”, he says.

Facebook’s researchers use aggregated, anonymised data from hundreds of millions of users on the site. This means that while they see information such as age, location, gender, a person’s relationship status, for example, such data is not tied back to a specific person.

It was in a study of 18 million anonymised Facebook posts exchanged by 462,000 Facebook couples that researchers delved into how “sweet” couples are to one another on the social networking site.

“For each timeline interaction, we counted the proportion of words expressing positive emotions (like ‘love’, ‘nice,’ ‘happy”, etc.) minus the proportion of words expressing negative ones (like ‘hate’, ‘hurt’, ‘bad’, etc.),” writes Facebook data scientist Carlos Diuk in Friday’s blog post. The data is plotted on a graph, which shows a visible, general increase in the proportion of warm fuzzy feelings right at the start of a relationship.

Hands & Hearts
Weavings from Jordan
Khalil Naouri
Editor: Katharine Scarfe Beckett
Design by Beyond, Amman, Jordan
Printed by National Press
Pp. 240

“Jordanian weaving is the work of artists. It is something to be fully experienced. You must see it, touch it, feel it and live with it. These pieces are so beautiful it is sometimes hard to imagine they were made for hard use.”

It is the avowed belief of the author of this precious book of aesthetic and documentary value that introduces the reader, novice and connoisseur alike, to Jordanian weaving and, by extension, a way of life.

Wishing to document this dying art form, Naouri, “passionate about traditional weavings that were made from forty to a hundred and fifty years ago”, has travelled the country’s length and breadth for well over a decade — initially trading in Jordanian weavings, later building a collection “to help share our heritage more widely” — to form a representative collection for this book and, later, a museum.

“I hope this will help us as Jordanians to begin to truly share and celebrate our rich history of weaving, and then to share Jordanian weaving with the world around us so it receives the attention it merits.”

Richly illustrated with different items woven for practical purpose of adornment, the book contains 150 photographs, mostly of the pieces that are part of a much larger collection of this passionate dealer turned scholar.

The colours and patterns of the rugs, pillow covers or decorative bands are amazingly similar, and akin to those of the region and the larger Mediterranean basin, proof that art and skill travel, and are adopted by mankind eager to learn and embellish its life.

“Rugs were traded and given between tribes, families, and individuals throughout Jordan, taking their designs with them to a new place where they might be imitated or adapted.

“Therefore, although we can recognise certain characteristics that belong to one town or region, there is no single, precise ‘code’ for the patterns in traditional weaving. Instead, each piece must be understood as itself, with its own maker, history and context,” says the author.

Made of sheep wool, goat hair and camel pile, the weavings are painstakingly created on, mostly, ground looms. Reds and oranges predominate, but there is also the whole range of browns, creamy white, dark blue and occasionally green.

While in the past the hues would have been made using natural dyes or simply the colour of the animal fibre, more recently weavers would resort to synthetic dyes.

“The process is harsh and unrelenting, like Jordan’s most extreme natural environments. However, when you experience a finished piece of Jordanian weaving, you do not feel the suffering, only the soul of its creator and the utility of the piece. There is no artifice here, just creativity and survival,” says Naouri who leaves no doubt about his passion for the outcome of this labour of love.

The items shown in this book are named in Arabic (with the English equivalent given), another attempt by the author to preserve tradition.

The reader will admire and come to learn the names of small bags for dried foodstuff (aliga) or bigger storage bags (idl), at times adorned with beads, buttons or shells; of village/town rugs (fijjeh) or of rugs used in bedouin tents (mafrash); of sleeping bags presented to newlyweds (ghafra) or of coverings for camel hindquarters (gafaya); but also terms used for certain patterns (Hosn design; nagesh, to create triangular blocks of colour; or ragm, a complex warp patterning in bands), and have a glimpse at a way of life by seeing the “saha” — “an often elaborately patterned dividing curtain for use inside the tent”, separating men from women — the “rasan” (camel headstall) or the “sfeefy” (long, colourful decorative bands for tents, camels and horses).

The book has another surprise: pages from a book published in 1958 from a manuscript by Maj. Gen. Frederick Gerard Peake, creator of the Arab Legion, who, in 1920, as lieutenant-colonel in the British army was sent to police parts of the territory then called Transjordan; and of maps showing the approximate geographical location of various tribes of Jordan.

The page from the preface of Peake’s book figured in Naouri’s book gives an idea of how Peake Pasha “came to know Transjordan well at about the same time that many of the weavings in this book were probably being created” and “explains a little how the three maps he made between the 1920s and 1930s came later to publication”.

“Jordan is a complex land of oral history, unique interpretations, and constant flux. Given these realities, it is important to realise that this is a book of art, not history,” says Naouri who, while going about documenting the items in his collection, recognised that although there are no definite characteristics setting tribes apart in the art of weaving, it is in fact possible to identify different types, origins and traditions within Jordan.

“A star shape on a rug might equally well represent a constellation or a spring flower. It might simply be a pattern used traditionally by the tribe who made it, or it might be newly created by its weaver,” he however acknowledges, perhaps by way of underlining, that the process is painstaking and only fairly accurate.

Wherever they originated, the items in Naouri’s book and the thousands in his collection were lovingly acquired, carefully preserved and are displayed in the hope that this dying skill may be revived and that Jordan’s traditional heritage is not forgotten.

For, as he says, “Jordanian weaving achieves the remarkable feat of being both essential for the traditional ways of life and also breathtakingly gorgeous.”

The book is available at Shiraz Store, Jordan Intercontinental Hotel, Books@café, Jacaranda Images, Jordan River Foundation, Readers@Cozmo, Wild Jordan and Alia Airport bookshops.

CHICAGO — Mothers may say they don’t care whether they have a son or a daughter, but their breast milk says otherwise.

“Mothers are producing different biological recipes for sons and daughters,” said Katie Hinde, an evolutionary biologist at Harvard University.

Studies in humans, monkeys and other mammals have found a variety of differences in both the content and the quantity of milk produced.

One common theme: Baby boys often get milk that is richer in fat or protein — and thus energy — while baby girls often get more milk.

There are a lot of theories as to why this happens, Hinde said Friday at the American Association for the Advancement of Science’s annual meeting.

Rhesus monkeys, for instance, tend to produce more calcium in the milk they feed to daughters who inherit social status from their mothers.

“It could be adaptive in that it allows mothers to give more milk to daughters which is going to accelerate their development and allow them to begin reproducing at early ages,” Hinde said.

Males don’t need to reach sexual maturity as quickly as females because the only limit on how often they reproduce is how many females they can win over.

The females also nurse for longer than male monkeys, who spend more time playing off on their own and thus need more energetically dense milk.

It is not yet clear why human mothers produce such different milk for their babies, Hinde said.

There is evidence, however, that the stage is set while the baby is still in utero.

Hinde published a study last week that showed that the sex of the foetus influences the milk production of cows long after they are separated from their calves (typically within hours of the birth).

The study of 1.49 million cows found that, over the course of two 305 day lactation periods, they produced an average of 445 kilos more milk when they had female calves than when they had bulls.

They also found no difference in the protein or fat content of the milk produced for heifers than for bulls.

Much remains to be understood about how breast milk impacts infant development in humans, Hinde said.

Knowing more could help improve the baby milk formulas sold to mothers who are unable or unwilling to nurse their infants, she said.

“While the food aspects of milk to some extent are replicated in formula, the immuno factors and medicine of milk are not and the hormonal signals are not,” she said.

Getting a better understanding of how milk is personalised for specific infants will also help hospitals find better matches for breast milk donated to help nourish sick and premature infants in neonatal units, she added.

DETROIT — The race to increase vehicle fuel economy is taking a toll on quality.

Owners of three-year-old vehicles are reporting more problems than they did a year ago, according to J.D. Power and Associates’ annual survey of vehicle dependability. It’s the first time since 1998 that the average number of problems per vehicle has increased.

J.D. Power, a California-based ratings and consulting company, said engine issues accounted for most of the increase in problems reported by the original owners of cars and trucks from the 2011 model year. Owners reported an average of 133 problems per 100 vehicles, up from 126 problems a year ago. Only problems within the prior 12 months are counted.

Automakers are rapidly implementing new engine technology to save fuel, including direct fuel injection and turbo charging, stop-start systems that automatically shut cars down at traffic lights and transmissions with higher gears. But those more complex systems can cause problems. David Sargent, J.D. Power’s vice president of global automotive, said the company saw an increase in complaints about engine hesitation, rough transmission shifts and lack of power.

“While striving to reduce fuel consumption, automakers must be careful not to compromise quality,” Sargent said in a statement.

The scores could improve in coming years because since 2011, automakers have worked to make new transmissions shift more smoothly, they’ve refined clunky stop-start systems and improved other fuel-saving technologies.

Lexus, Mercedes-Benz and Cadillac had the vehicles with the fewest reported problems. Lexus had just 68 problems per 100 vehicles, the only brand with fewer than 100 problems.

General Motors Co. had the most winners in each segment, with eight, including the highest-ranked compact car, the Chevrolet Volt, and the highest-ranked pickup, the GMC Sierra. Toyota Motor Co. was second with seven segment winners, including the Toyota Camry minivan and Lexus ES luxury compact car.

Mini, Dodge and Land Rover had the most reported problems. Mini, the worst performer, had 185 problems per 100 vehicles.

The survey questioned 41,000 owners of 2011 model year vehicles between October and December of last year.

TORONTO –– A Canadian study that many experts say has major flaws has revived debate about the value of mammograms. The research suggests that these screening X-rays do not lower the risk of dying of breast cancer while finding many tumours that do not need treatment.

The study gives longer follow-up on nearly 90,000 women who had annual breast exams by a nurse to check for lumps plus a mammogram, or the nurse’s breast exam alone. After more than two decades, breast cancer death rates were similar in the two groups, suggesting little benefit from mammograms.

It’s important to note that this study did not compare mammograms to no screening at all, as most other research on this topic has. Many groups have not endorsed breast exams for screening because of limited evidence that they save lives.

Critics of the Canadian study also say it used outdated equipment and poor methods that made mammograms look unfairly ineffective.

The study was published Wednesday in the British journal BMJ.

Breast cancer is the leading type of cancer and cause of cancer deaths in women worldwide. Nearly 1.4 million new cases are diagnosed each year. Many studies have found that mammography saves lives, but how many and for what age groups is debatable. It also causes many false alarms and over treatment of cancers never destined to become life-threatening.

In the US, a government-appointed task force that gives screening advice does not back mammograms until age 50, and then only every other year. The American Cancer Society recommends them every year starting at age 40.

Other countries screen less aggressively. In Britain, for example, mammograms are usually offered only every three years.

The Canadian study has long been the most pessimistic on the value of mammograms. It initially reported that after five years of screening, 666 cancers were found among women given mammograms plus breast exams versus 524 cancers among those given the exams alone.

After 25 years of follow-up, about 500 in each group died, suggesting mammograms were not saving lives. The similarity in the death rates suggests that the 142 “extra” cancers caught by mammograms represent over-diagnosis — tumours not destined to prove fatal, study leaders concluded.

The work was immediately criticised. The American College of Radiology and Society of Breast Imaging called it “an incredibly misleading analysis based on the deeply flawed and widely discredited” study. Mammograms typically find far more cancers than this study did, suggesting the quality was poor, the groups contend.

In a letter posted by the medical journal, Dr Daniel Kopans, a radiologist at Harvard Medical School, described outdated machines and methods he saw in 1990, when he was one of the experts asked to review the quality of mammograms used in the study.

“I can personally attest to the fact that the quality was poor,” he wrote. “To save money they used secondhand mammography machines” that gave poor images, failed to properly position breasts for imaging, and did not train radiologists on how to interpret the scans, he wrote.

It was bound to happen and we’re almost there. Wearable computers are the next critical phase in private computing. What could be more pleasant and convenient than to wear fancy eye glasses that let you watch video and browse the web displaying a large screen, with Dolby sound, merely by looking straight ahead of you, free to move around?

When desktops are too bulky and immovable, when laptops aren’t as portable as you would like them to be, when tablets are not powerful enough and smartphones too small to enjoy large images, wearable computers in the shape of eye glasses may just be the answer.

Call it augmented reality, computer-powered glasses or simply computer glasses, the technology may currently be the most thrilling aspect of living with the Internet and with computers. Epson and Google are the main contenders in this huge, promising market of which we have barely seen the tip. Epson calls its product Moverio and Google calls it, well… Google Glass.

Using the term “computer” for a device that is before anything else a sophisticated display would be exaggerated. The glasses do hardly more than display an image before your very eyes, on the transparent glass fitted in the great-looking frame, giving you the impression that you are watching a big, movie-like screen image.

They do come with impressive features like 3D, Dolby sound, a built-in camera, motion sensors and an advanced Android controller, all in the elegant casing of the glasses, but they also have serious limitations like cables to start with. Yes, the glasses are tethered to the pocket-size Android controller via cables. This alone takes out a good part of the wearable adjective. Using cables is going backwards.

And then there’s the price. Epson’s Moverio older not-so-great model BT-100 can be purchased for $400, whereas there isn’t yet a price tag on the newer, much improved BT-200. There’s a huge difference in the design quality and the functionality between BT-100 and the BT-200. The bottom line found in most technical reviews is “no comparison”. As for Google’s glasses, at about $2,000 they aren’t exactly a steal either!

Virtually all those who have tried these tech toys agree to say that this is only the beginning. In IT jargon all models of wearable display glasses are still in their beta, i.e. not final version. It’s the idea that counts and it’s a great one, beyond any doubt. One of the most striking descriptions was given by CNet: “Limited, fascinating, full of potential”. It says it all.

Perhaps the wisest approach to wearable displays now is to consider them as experimental technology. If you try to buy one thinking it’s going to be very friendly and flawless you will be in for a big disappointment. It is far from being a mature product like a tablet or a smartphone for example.

On the other hand if you are curious, have a lot of time and also some cash put aside, “trying on” a wearable display would make sense. At the speed things usually evolve in IT I wouldn’t be surprised to see wearable computer glasses become common staple in say three to four years. And of course by then they would be affordable, totally wireless and full-fledged computers.

NEW YORK –– Babies born prematurely may benefit from people talking to them while they are still in the hospital's intensive care unit, suggests a new study.

Researchers found that premature babies who were exposed to more talking from adults, such as their parents, in the neonatal intensive care unit (NICU), tended to score higher on development tests later on.

"This is certainly a remarkable, easy-to-implement and cost-effective intervention of informing moms of visiting their children in the intensive care unit," Dr Betty Vohr said.

Vohr is the study's senior author from the Warren Alpert Medical School of Brown University and Women and Infants Hospital in Providence, Rhode Island.

She and her colleagues write in the journal Paediatrics that a baby still in the womb is exposed to its mother's voice, but a baby born very prematurely is kept in a NICU, where it is exposed to noises from monitors and machines but little talk.

Previous research has found that children born early are at an increased risk for language problems later on, but it's unknown whether talking to them early on will help their later scores.

For the new study, the researchers recruited families of 36 babies that were medically stable but born before 32 weeks of pregnancy and kept in the NICU.

A baby is considered "full term" if it is born between 39 and 41 weeks of pregnancy, according to the American College of Obstetricians and Gynaecologists and the Society for Maternal-Foetal Medicine (see Reuters Health story of October 22, 2013 here: reut.rs/189Cm4Q.)

The babies in the study wore vests equipped with devices that record and analyse the conversations and background noises near the baby over 16 hours. The recordings were taken at 32 and 36 weeks of gestational age.

Overall, the babies were exposed to more talking at 36 weeks than at 32 weeks, but the actual amount of talk each baby was exposed to during the study periods varied from 144 words to over 26,000 words.

The word tallies were then compared to babies' Bayley-III scores, which measure how a baby is developing in regards to motor, language and thinking skills, at seven and 18 months of age.

The researchers found that after taking into account a child's birth weight, the amount of talking a baby was exposed to at 32 weeks accounted for 12 per cent of differences in children's language scores and 20 per cent of variation in their communication scores at 18 months of age.

The amount of talking a baby was exposed to at 36 weeks also accounted for about 26 per cent of variation in thinking scores at seven months of age.

Overall, the researchers found that an increased amount of adult talk in the NICU was tied to higher language and thinking scores on the tests.

"To our knowledge, this is the first study showing that early exposure in the NICU of preterm infants to higher numbers of adult words is positively correlated with cognitive and language outcomes after discharge," the researchers write.

WASHINGTON –– Technology helps bring married couples closer together even though the use of electronic devices can be a source of tension, a US survey showed Tuesday.

The Pew Internet survey found 21 per cent of married or partnered adults felt closer to their spouse or partner because of exchanges they had online or via text message.

One in four of the couples surveyed said they texted their partner when they were both home together and 9 per cent have resolved an argument online or by text message that they were having difficulty resolving in person.

But the survey also found technology was a source of tension for some couples.

Twenty-five per cent of cell phone owners in a marriage or partnership said their spouse or partner was distracted by their cell phone when they were together.

And 8 per cent said they argued with their spouse or partner about the amount of time one of them was spending online.

The trends appeared magnified among younger adults surveyed, Pew found.

The survey found 42 per cent of 18-29 year olds with cell phones in serious relationships say their partner has been distracted by their mobile phone; but 41 per cent in the age group said they felt closer to their partner because of online or text conversations.

“Technology is everywhere and our relationships are no exception,” said Amanda Lenhart, a Pew researcher and lead author of the report.

“And for younger adults and those in newer relationships, tools such as cell phones and social media were there at the beginning and play a greater role today for good and for ill.”

The survey also found two out of three people in a marriage or committed relationship shared a password to one or more of their online accounts with their spouse or partner.

One in four of those in a couple said they share an e-mail account with a partner and 11 per cent of these couples have an online calendar that they share.

The Pew researchers found those who have been married or partnered 10 years or less have different digital habits.

Those who were already together as a couple at the advent of a new platform or technology were more likely to jump on together, while those who begin relationships with their own existing accounts and profiles tend to continue to use them separately as individuals, the report said.

Some 9 per cent of adult mobile phone owners surveyed said they have sent a sext –– or sexually suggestive image –– of themselves to someone else, up from 6 per cent in 2012.

And one in five cell owners have received a sext of someone else they know on their phone, up from 15 per cent who said this in 2012.

The report is based on a survey of 2,252 US adults from April 17 to May 19. The margin of error for married or partnered adults is estimated at 2.9 points and for cell phone owners 2.4 percentage points.

NEW YORK –– For people with osteoarthritis of the hip, pain levels tracked with the weather over the course of a small two-year study, Dutch researchers say.

They looked at reported pain levels in a previous study of arthritis, then went back to weather records to document the conditions each day.

It turns out the participants’ aches were just a little worse and joints just a little stiffer when humidity and barometric pressure levels rose.

“This is something that patients talk about all the time,” Dr Patience White told Reuters Health. A rheumatologist and vice president for Public Health Policy and Advocacy for the Arthritis Foundation, she was not involved in the study.

Osteoarthritis affects about 27 million Americans. Common risk factors include getting older, being obese, having previous joint injuries, overuse, weak muscles and genetics.

White said she often sees patients who say they are sensitive to the weather.

“Nobody’s bedridden by the weather change,” she said, “It’s not severe pain, they just ache more.”

More than 60 per cent of patients with osteoarthritis say that weather conditions, such as rain, barometric pressure and temperature have an impact on their pain and stiffness, according to the study team, which was led by Desirée Dorleijn, of Erasmus MC University Medical Centre Rotterdam.

Past research attempting to investigate the weather connection had yielded inconsistent results, so Dorleijn and her colleagues looked at self-reported hip pain and function in 222 osteoarthritis patients who participated in a glucosamine sulphate study.

The patients enrolled in the study filled out questionnaires every three months for two years, including the Western Ontario and McMasters University Osteoarthritis Index (WOMAC), which is scale for self-assessment of pain and function. The WOMAC scores range from 0 to 100, with 0 indicating no pain.

The researchers gathered weather reports for the days the patients filled out the questionnaires. The information gathered from the Royal Netherlands Meteorological Institute included average temperature, wind speed, hours of sunlight, rainfall, humidity and barometric pressure.

Patients who underwent surgeries for their arthritis were dropped during the study; so 188 participants completed the full two years of monitoring.

About 70 per cent of participants were women, averaging about 63 years old.

The average starting WOMAC pain score was 23.1 and the function score was 35.1. Those scores improved slightly — each by about two points — throughout the study.

But when the researchers compared weather conditions to pain and function scores, they found that pain scores worsened by one point for each 10 per cent increase in humidity. Function scores worsened by one point for every 10 hectopascals (0.29 of an inch) increase in barometric pressure.

For a change to be considered “clinically relevant”, it has to alter the WOMAC score by at least 10 points, Dorleijn’s team writes in the journal Pain.

Since variations in humidity and barometric pressure are limited, they could account for changes of five to six WOMAC points at the most, they write.

White agreed that requiring a 10-point change to be significant is the accepted approach to using the WOMAC scale. But that doesn’t mean the pain wasn’t real, she said.

“This is about people seeing a little bit of change, whether it’s the humidity or barometric pressure or function or pain,” White said.

Apart from its small size, the study did have some limitations, White noted. For instance, the patients didn’t have severe osteoarthritis and the pain was only in one joint. Still, she thinks it was a good study.

“They did the best they can do, and they did find a little bit of change. They decided it wasn’t significant,” she said.

But, she said, just because findings didn’t reach statistical significance from the researchers’ point of view, they can be significant from the patients’ point of view.