Melinda Beck of the Wall Street Journal’s Health Journal column has an excellent piece on everything you wanted to know about the common cold (and, yes, your mother was right, chills may lead to a cold).
Here are some great tips / info to help you get through the last few weeks of winter:
1. When we experience a cold it’s not a virus, it’s the body’s immune system making chemicals to help flush out infection.
2. Bradykinin, a key chemical present in colds, stimulates the nasal membranes to produce a runny nose and also produces other chemicals leading to a scratchy throat and congestion.
3. White blood cells release cytokines, which cause fever, headache, muscle aches, and loss of appetite.
4. The body chooses to fight certain cold viruses and not all of them (this is a medical mystery, but it’s about genetics, the virus, and the patient).
5. People who sleep less than 7 hours are most susceptible to getting a cold.
6. People with low levels of Vitamin D are also more susceptible to colds.
7. Any type of stress can make a cold worse (such as job loss, death in the family, bad hair day, argument with spouse, etc.).
8. In 2005, researchers at the Common Cold Centre chilled the feet of 90 subjects in cold water and found they developed 2x as many colds as subjects with dry feet.
9. Keep your nose covered in cold weather.
10. It takes 5-10 days to get rid of a cold and there’s no evidence that treating the symptoms actually speeds up recovery.
11. There’s no proof cough medicines work, but you try and make yourself comfortable via acetaminophen (Advil), hot liquids, and decongestant sprays.
12. Colds do not spread as easily as most people think; unless of course folks are around kids (such as teachers – sorry if you’re reading this in your classroom!). Kids are “bags of viruses”, as Beck states in the article.
