Understanding How Your Blood Reacts To Cold Is A Lifesaver

Every winter we are bombarded by information about the cold and how to protect ourselves from it and from health issues associated with it.

Wrap up warm; keep one room heated to a minimum 18*C; avoid hypothermia; eat and drink warm food; get the boiler serviced to avoid carbon monoxide poisoning; turn off the Christmas tree lights to avoid fire. It’s endless.

Every winter in the UK, upwards of 20,000 extra deaths occur that are attributed in one way or another to the cold. These are referred to as ‘excess deaths from all causes’ on the official statistics. Now, that wording makes it sound like the medics record which deaths are caused by the cold. In some cases they do, but in most they don’t; the figure is derived by taking the figure for the deaths recorded during non-winter months and taking it away from the winter tally; the number left is the excess deaths from all causes figure.

Now, some things that happen in winter are fully understandable and clearly lead to more deaths than would occur in drier warmer weather. Road accidents, domestic boiler incidents, house fires, drowning from falling through ice, asthma, pneumonia, falls, influenza and so on all have a higher incidence level in winter than at any other time of year.

There are, however, other deaths that occur that are directly attributable to cold weather that never even get a mention as weather related. We are all aware that heavy duty snow shoveling can cause a person to keel over with a heart attack, but this is not the main cause of heart attacks during cold weather. Heart attack and strokes, or to give them their proper names, cardiac arrest and cerebro-vascular accidents are responsible for thousands of cold weather deaths each year. They are listed on the statistics as exactly what they are, but as a heart or brain does not have ‘packed up due to cold weather’ stamped on it at autopsy it’s hard to absolutely say the death was caused by the weather.

Even though it was.

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