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Can a Change in the Weather Alter Your Health?

Publishing in the journal Neurology, Professor Kenneth Mukamal and colleagues report a statistically significant link between high air temperatures, low pressures and the onset of severe migraine headaches.

Specifically, a temperature rise of 5C led to a 7.5 per cent higher risk of severe headache. A similar, but smaller, correlation was found between lower barometric pressure and migraine pain.

This comes as no surprise to Dr Tish Laing-Morton, the Met Office’s medical expert, who researches the often subtle links between weather and the way we feel.

‘These links are often ignored,’ she says. ‘The effects of the weather have often been seen as a bit peripheral. But there are all sorts of things we are influenced by that we don’t understand.’

Maybe cold weather can give you a cold

Historically, attempts to find links between environmental factors, such as air pollution, and health, have tried to statistically ‘cancel out’ the effects of the weather when producing their results. Only recently has the weather itself been put centre stage in studies attempting to find out why certain things happen to our bodies.

In fact, recent research has given a fair amount of scientific backing to what had been dismissed as, at best, old wives’ tales, such as old soldiers’ shrapnel wounds hurting more in cold weather. It is quite possible that cold weather can, for instance, give you a cold.

Colds and flu are, of course, caused and transmitted by viruses, not by low temperatures, but an intriguing study being carried out by Exeter University scientists, using historic data from the 1889 flu epidemic, shows a compelling correlation between small temperature falls and admissions to hospital.