"This research is an outstanding example of how physicians and investigators from different disciplines join forces to produce translational science with the potential to help patients," said Shlomo Melmed, MB, ChB, executive vice president of Academic Affairs and dean of the Medical Faculty at Cedars-Sinai. "This important work is made possible by the dual leadership of Cedars-Sinai as both a distinguished academic institution and an outstanding hospital."

To perform the study, the research team generated special stem cells, known as induced pluripotent stem cells (iPSCs), from cells of patients with young-onset Parkinson's disease. This process involves taking adult blood cells "back in time" to a primitive embryonic state. These iPSCs can then produce any cell type of the human body, all genetically identical to the patient's own cells. The team used the iPSCs to produce dopamine neurons from each patient and then cultured them in a dish and analyzed the neurons' functions.

"So many people live with chronic pain," she says, "affecting their work, family life, and their mental health. Even when we've followed the best pain management advice, we often still experience daily pain."

Dixon suggests that the study's findings could lead to meteorologists giving pain forecasts alongside air quality projections, which could help people with chronic pain "plan their activities, completing harder tasks on days predicted to have lower levels of pain." This would be no small thing. Says Stephen Simpson, Ph.D., of the advocacy organization Versus Arthritis: "We know that, of the 10 million people in the U.K. with arthritis, over half experience life-altering pain every day. But our healthcare system is simply not geared up to effectively help people with arthritis with their number-one concern."

"Weather has been thought to affect symptoms in patients with arthritis since Hippocrates," says lead study author Prof. Will Dixon, director of the Centre for Epidemiology Versus Arthritis, at the University of Manchester. "Around three-quarters of people living with arthritis believe their pain is affected by the weather."