Study: Cold May Actually Cause Colds

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The New York Sun

It turns out cold may have something to do with the common cold after all.


For years, doctors scoffed at folklore that bundling up could help in staving off the sniffles, but British researchers have come out with a new study showing that a drop in body temperature could lead to a cold.


Researchers at the Common Cold Centre at Cardiff University in Wales recruited 180 students and asked half of them to soak their feet in a bucket of chilly water for 20 minutes. The other half kept on their socks and shoes and stuck their feet in an empty bucket.


Days later, a third of the students exposed to the icy water reported back that they had developed a cold, compared with 9% of the control group, according to the study, published in Oxford University’s Journal of Family Practice.


“This is the first scientific evidence, really, to go against the previous scientific research that was done about 40 years ago,” the director of the Common Cold Centre and the co-author of the study, Ronald Eccles, told CNN yesterday.


He said that many people may be mildly infected without showing symptoms. The chilling of the feet causes the blood vessels in the nose to constrict, which makes the nose colder and reduces the blood circulation, cutting off the supply of white blood cells needed to fight infection.


“Although the chilled subject believes they have ‘caught a cold,’ what has in fact happened is that the dormant infection has taken hold,” he said.


For most New Yorkers, the unseasonably warm temperatures have kept cold and flu season off the radar.


Lily Shapiro, a pharmacist at King’s Pharmacy in Lower Manhattan, said yesterday that she is curious about the report.


“I grew up in Russia, where it was common knowledge that you don’t get your feet wet,” Ms. Shapiro said while flipping through the study behind the counter. “My mother made me wear big furry boots, but I always dismissed at as an old wives’ tale.”


An assistant professor of medicine and pediatrics at Mount Sinai Hospital, Mary Jo DiMilia, said she had her doubts about the research.


“If it were so definitive, more people in the study that had their feet wet would have gotten sick,” she said.


Dr. DiMilia also wondered about other contributing factors like stress, nutrition, and sleep deprivation. At the same time, she said she’s going to have to think twice before telling patients that it’s all right to go outside without first bundling up.


“It kind of makes you chuckle because we all try to tell our mothers that going out with wet hair has no bearing on whether you get sick,” Dr. DiMilia said. “But I guess they might not have been wrong.”


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