Associations Between Daily Symptoms and Pain Flares in Rheumatoid Arthritis: Case-Crossover mHealth Study
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Background: Mobile health (mHealth) technologies, such as smartphones and wearables, enable continuous assessments of individual health information. In chronic musculoskeletal conditions, pain flares, defined as periods of increased pain severity, often coincide with worsening disease activity and cause significant impacts on physical and emotional well-being. Using mHealth technologies can provide insights into individual pain patterns and associated factors. Objective: This study aims to characterize pain flares and identify associated factors in rheumatoid arthritis (RA) by (1) describing the frequency and duration of pain flares using progressively stringent definitions based on pain severity, and (2) exploring associations between pain flares and temporal changes in symptoms across emotional, cognitive, and behavioral domains. Methods: Our 30-day mHealth study collected daily pain severity and related symptoms (scores 1-5, higher are worse) via a smartphone app and passively recorded sleep and physical activity via a wrist-worn accelerometer. Pain flares were defined using a 5-point scale: (1) above average (AA): pain severity > personal median, (2) above threshold (AT): pain severity > 3, and (3) move above threshold (MAT): pain severity moves from 1, 2, 3 to 4 or 5. A case-crossover analysis compared within-person variations of daily symptoms across hazard (3 days before a pain flare) and control (3 days not preceding a pain flare) periods using mean and intraindividual standard deviation. Conditional logistic regression estimated the odds ratio (OR) for pain flare occurrence. Results: A total of 195 participants (160/195, 82.1% females; mean age 57.2 years; average years with RA: 11.3) contributed 5290 days of data. Of these, 88.7% (173/195) experienced at least 1 AA flare (median monthly rate 4, IQR 2.1-5). Nearly half experienced at least 1 AT or MAT flare (median monthly rate 2, IQR 1-4). These pain flares lasted 2 days (IQR 2-3) on average across definitions, with some extending up to 12 days. Worsening mood over 3 days was associated with a 2-fold increase in the likelihood of AT flares the following day (OR 2.04, IQR 1.06-3.94; P<.05). Greater variability in anxiety over 3 days increased the likelihood of both AT (OR 1.67, IQR 1.01-2.78; P<.05) and MAT flares (OR 1.82, IQR 1.08-3.07; P<.05). Similarly, greater variability in sleepiness (OR 1.89, IQR 1.03-3.47; P<.05) also increased the likelihood of AT flares. Sedentary time (%) consistently showed almost no influence across all definitions. Similarly, the simplest definition of AA demonstrated no significant associations across all symptoms. Conclusions: Pain flares were commonly observed in RA. Changes in sleep patterns and emotional distress were associated with pain flare occurrences. This analysis demonstrates the potential of daily mHealth data to identify pain flares, opening opportunities for timely monitoring and personalized management.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.004 | 0.006 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.002 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Research integrity | 0.002 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.002 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".