Penn State researchers say that negative and depressive moods may affect a person's rheumatoid arthritis pain and symptoms.

Penn State health researchers say that negative and depressive moods may affect a person's rheumatoid arthritis pain and symptoms. Researchers tracked 152 participants with rheumatoid arthritis by having them make diary entries on mobile devices five times a day for a week. The Annals of Behavioral Medicine recently published the findings, according to an article on the MD Magazine website.

Test findings

Doctors found that the people studied claimed more arthritic pain when they were in a negative mood as opposed to a positive one. While previous studies found correlations between pain and inflammation and mental states over periods of months and years, the Penn State researchers wanted to find out whether the pain fluctuated during a day.

Jennifer E. Graham-Engeland, an associate professor of biobehavioral health at the school and one of the researchers, said they wanted to track the subjects' mood and pain over the course of a regular day without the intervention of researchers or a laboratory at every step.

"The results of this study link momentary positive and negative mood with momentary pain in daily life," Graham-Engeland told Penn State News. "That is, we found evidence consistent with a common, but largely untested, contention that mood in the moment is associated with fluctuation in pain and pain-related restrictions."

Patients in a good mood reported less swelling and stiffness, along with decreased frequency of other arthritic problems that rheumatoid arthritis can bring. According to Graham-Engeland, she and her partners claim that a positive mindset during the day helped to mitigate momentary pain.

Depression and rheumatoid arthritis

According to the Penn State researchers, more studies need to be done regarding the possible cause-and-effect relationship between mood and arthritis.

Rheumatoid arthritis is a chronic autoimmune disease that causes swelling and pain in hands, feet and other joints while it damages the body's tissues, according to the Mayo Clinic. The inflammatory illness usually occurs in people over the age of 40 and is more common in women than in men.

Depression can be common in people living with rheumatoid arthritis, as previous studies have shown. According to the Arthritis Foundation, Russian researchers presented a study in 2009 suggesting that 63 percent of the 75 participants in the study suffered from depression as well as the autoimmune disease.

Some doctors say that which illness causes the other is not important.

"What we know is that suffering from one tends to correlate with suffering from another," Christopher Edwards, director of the Chronic Pain Program at Duke University Medical Center, told the Arthritis Foundation. "So whether they cause one another is less important than that they exist together and should be treated together."

For more on arthritis and mood:

Handling Depression and Arthritis
Arthritis & Depression: Recognize the Signs
Antidepressants, Anti-Anxiety Medication, and You