City noise makes fibromyalgia pain worse, a new study shows. Patients reported sharper pain after listening to urban sounds than after natural ones, silence, or white noise.
The trial, published this month in PAIN, tracked 88 adults with fibromyalgia in Spain. 91% were women, with an average age of 53.8 years and symptoms lasting 19 years. Each participant sat through four 20-minute audio sessions—urban noise, nature sounds, broadband noise, and silence—spread a week apart.
Pain scores jumped after city sounds
On a 100-millimeter scale, pain intensity averaged 58.66 mm after urban recordings. That’s nearly 10 points higher than after natural sounds (48.98 mm) and almost 13 points above silence (45.83 mm). Broadband noise, like static or pink noise, scored 46.78 mm.
Urban clips included traffic, construction, and muffled voices. Nature tracks featured birds, wind, and rain. Researchers adjusted for baseline pain and randomized the order of sessions to avoid bias.
“This study may help us counsel patients to see if certain sounds worsen pain,” said Amanda Sammut, a rheumatologist at Columbia University and Harlem Hospital. She called the findings a step toward non-drug treatments for fibromyalgia.
Auditory triggers validated
Pavan Tankha, a pain specialist at Cleveland Clinic, said some of his patients have anecdotally reported that noise influences their pain. “Patients will say loud sounds and different sensory input can make their pain worse,” Dr. Tankha told MedCentral. “For the longest time, I would tell patients, ‘I believe you. I just don’t have an explanation for this.’ And so this is just another feather in the cap for those of us who treat fibromyalgia, that we should listen to the patient.”
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Still, Tankha cautioned against overinterpreting the results. Participants listened to recordings, not real-world environments. “I wouldn’t tell patients to move out of the city based on this,” he said. “But I’d ask about their home or work noise and suggest small changes, like noise-canceling headphones.”
Sammut emphasized that while drugs help, lifestyle tweaks like sound management could offer relief.
Sammut reported no conflicts.
For now, the study suggests a simple question—“Does noise make your pain worse?”—could lead to practical advice. Avoiding triggers, Sammut said, might be as simple as wearing headphones in a crowded subway or closing windows during rush hour.
It’s a small shift, but for patients who’ve spent decades chasing answers, it’s something.