C19- Tamar Weather has developed a weather forecast that can give the weather, air quality and health charts (migraines, arthritis, breathing, sinus, allergies) according to the outside temperature, we have collected with more than 700 meteorologists around the world and the support of the World Health Organization to collect all the information and create reliable data to warn people of the health risks involved.
It is obvious that pollution contributes to the aggravation of heart disease, lung disease or migraines associated with a humid climate.
The weather has a real impact on our health.
Gilles Brien, a meteorologist who has worked for over 30 years at Environment Canada.
Brien found answers to all these questions and more through a career-long passion for biometeorology, a millennia-old science known to Hippocrates but neglected by modern medicine and science, probably because of its subjectivity and the impossibility of replicating climate in a laboratory, he says.
Gilles Brien has tried everything, throughout his career, scientific studies as well as absolutely incredible statistics on the subject that he has compiled in a book entitled Human Barometers.
“We’ve known for a hundred years that children born in winter are more likely to get certain diseases,” he says. If you are born in October, however, you should live four years longer than the average person.
In order to enrich his book, Gilles Brien joined forces with Dr. Wilhelm Pellemans, a surgeon, anthropologist and biologist. Their research and observations confirm that even though humans live in the warmth of their homes and work in air conditioning in the summer, they are influenced by wind, bad weather, sun, temperature extremes and variations in atmospheric pressure.
Grandma’s weather-predicting pains are no longer a mystery. “The tissue that renews around a scar is young and has different rates of wound expansion than older tissue. When the skin contracts, with a change in pressure or temperature, the different rates of expansion will cause you to feel tightness,” Brien says.
The electrification of the air would also have a lot to do with it. Positive ions brought in by high winds, for example, or the arrival of a front, bring their own set of health problems. On the other hand, when air ions are negative, “children learn better,” he says.
One in five people have migraines severe enough to interfere with work, school or sleep. In Canada, three million people suffer from migraines on a regular basis. In a 2013 survey by the National Headache Foundation in the United States, three out of four migraine patients say their headaches are triggered by the weather. Sudden changes in temperature, humidity, hot and humid weather, thunderstorms and strong winds seem to be the worst migraine triggers. Superstitions or popular wisdom? What is it really?
One of the earliest studies on the subject is Canadian and dates back to 1981. Environment Canada’s chief climatologist, David Phillips, studied the issue. His findings are consistent with most studies done on the subject around the world. Migraines are on the rise when barometric pressure varies greatly and temperatures and humidity rise in your area after a warm air mass arrives.
Having a headache is a normal part of life. Migraines, on the other hand, are serious medical conditions that require immediate attention. Specialists are still unraveling the mysteries of migraines. Initially, migraines are caused by vasoconstriction of the arteries of the cortex, which in turn causes vasodilation of the arteries of the meninges and scalp. From this point on, there is no agreement on what happens next. What we do know is that decreases in barometric pressure cause water retention, tissue swelling, and increased pressure in the brain. Warm air masses, on the other hand, generally degrade air quality. Warm air is less revitalizing than cold air because it contains less oxygen. (For the same volume and pressure according to the law of perfect gases).
Apparently, there are two places in the world where you can avoid migraines because of the weather conditions. These places are known especially for the high ambient barometric pressure because they are below sea level. Unfortunately, they are a bit difficult to access. This is the Dead Sea, between Israel and the Grand Canyon in Arizona!
Scientists from the University of Manchester (UK) have just published a study in the journal Nature and have found a moderate but significant link between the intensity of pain in patients suffering from joint problems (arthritis, osteoarthritis, rheumatoid arthritis, fibromyalgia…) and the ambient humidity.
“Since Hippocrates, weather conditions have been thought to affect symptoms in arthritis patients,” says Prof. William Dixon, lead author of the study and director of the Centre for Arthritis Epidemiology at the University of Manchester. “About three quarters of people with arthritis believe that the weather affects their pain,” he added.
It was still necessary to prove that this weather/pain link was real. To do this, the authors recruited more than 13,000 people, and collected the final data from 2,658 of them, who gave their daily pain feelings via a smartphone application, for six months. While most of the participants (80.8% of whom were women) suffered from rheumatoid arthritis (18.5%) or osteoarthritis (24.1%), others suffered from fibromyalgia (26.4%), unspecified arthritis (34.6%) or neuropathic pain.
Specially designed for the study, the smartphone app assessed pain levels while collecting weather data through the phone’s GPS.
“The analysis showed that on wet and windy days with low air pressure, the chances of having more pain, compared to an average day, was about 20%,” Prof. Dixon detailed. “That would mean that if your chances of having a painful day when the weather is average are 5 in 100, they would increase to 6 in 100 on a wet and windy day,” he added. The most painful days in terms of painful feelings were found to be days that were both wet, windy and cold. No relationship between pain and amount of precipitation alone or temperature alone was observed.
Prof. Dixon suggests that these results may lead meteorologists to give pain forecasts alongside air quality forecasts, to help people with chronic pain “plan their activities by doing more difficult tasks on days when pain is less intense.”
As one of the study participants pointed out to Medical News Today, this study allows patients to feel less guilty about their pain, to accept that the pain may be unrelated to what they did or did not do.