Grandma was right all along, getting chilly can give you a cold

Nov 14 2005

Welsh researchers have confirmed what your grandma always said was true that getting cold and chilly can give you a cold.

Scientists, who for years have been telling us that there is no connection between developing the viral infection and a drop in body temperature, have now turned that theory completely on its head.

Researchers at Cardiff University's Common Cold Centre paid 90 students to sit for 20 minutes with their bare feet in buckets of cold water.

They found that a few days later 13 of the students reported such cold symptoms as a runny nose or sore throat, compared to five in a control group of 90 students who kept their feet dry in socks and shoes.

The centre's director Professor Ron Eccles says that when you dip your feet into cold water, you cause a pronounced constriction to the blood vessels in the nose, and that is one of the factors they believe that actually can aid the virus by lowering the defences within the nose and triggering the symptomatic infection.

In previous studies patients were inoculated with the cold virus and then chilled, but no link between temperature and catching a cold was found.

This research by Eccles is apparently different in that it took healthy people from the general population and then chilled them.

Professor Eccles believes that when common colds are circulating in the community, for every person who actually has a cold there are two or three who are infected but haven't developed symptoms.

He says it is when people are chilled that a sub-clinical infection or symptom-free infection is converted into a common cold with symptoms.

The study found that the trial students developing cold symptoms also reported they suffered significantly more colds each year than those who remained symptom-free.

This say the researchers indicates there may be a group of people in the population who are more susceptible and may have a "common cold constitution".

Eccles says that in the past our ancestors were exposed to much greater soakings and chillings than we are, and they would have laughed at any doubt that chilling can lead to common cold symptoms.

The study is published in the journal Family Practice.