Does weather really impact various health conditions or illnesses? Millions of people will respond with a definitive response while a variety of studies often dispute those claims.

I’ve had really torn up bad knees for the past 50 years. My family will verify that I regularly predict a storm a day or two before it arrives. My oldest daughter was given anti-cancer drugs without her knowledge for a noncancerous condition and the drugs ate away most of the cartilage in her knees. So that she walks with bone on bone. She too often predicts storms and weather changes.

Yet, I’ve seen some reports, even from this past year, that disputes the claim that people with joint problems can predict changes in the weather, especially approaching storms. My response to them is that many animals in nature seem to know in advance of approaching storms and will seek shelter or move to a more conducive location. What is it in them that allows them to predict the weather, but not humans?

I worked with a man who suffers from multiple sclerosis and he and I often compared our throbbing joints prior to the arrival of bad weather.

It is a known fact that cold can make some conditions worse, especially skin conditions and hot weather can also impact a person’s health. Due to the presence of a small tumor, my daughter has never handled heat very well. She can come out of a shower with red skin and fever over 101ºF.

The same controversy exists about the impact of weather and someone catching a cold. For years, we’ve been told to dress warm and avoid getting chilled or we’ll catch our death of a cold. Yet, I’ve seen studies that say that weather temperatures and the effect of a person getting chilled has absolutely no bearing on someone catching a cold.

If weather doesn’t impact health, then why does the flu season come and go around the same time every year, with changes in the weather?

One report I found says that the following health conditions are impacted by changes in the weather – infections and illnesses of the upper respiratory tract, chronic sinus and throat issues, seasonal asthma and bronchitis triggered by cold air, seasonal allergies (related to pollens), cold and flu outbreaks, muscles and joint injuries (told you).

But what about a condition such as Alzheimer’s disease? Could weather really impact this form of dementia?

Check out this report:

The thinking ability of people with Alzheimer’s disease changes depending on the season, researchers report.

These patients are better in the late summer and early fall than in the winter and spring, according to the analysis of data on nearly 3,400 Alzheimer’s patients in the United States, Canada and France.

“There may be value in increasing dementia-related clinical resources in the winter and early spring, when symptoms are likely to be most pronounced,” said researcher Andrew Lim, from Sunnybrook Health Sciences Center and the University of Toronto.

Specifically, improvements in average thinking (“cognitive”) skills in the summer and fall were equivalent to nearly 5 years less in age-related declines in thinking ability, the investigators found.

The seasonal differences remained even after factors such as depression, sleep, physical activity and thyroid status were taken in to account.

So, yes! It seems that changes in the weather and seasons do have an impact on Alzheimer’s, just like it does on so many other health conditions. The ticket to avoid these changes as much as possible is to live in an area that changes very little, such as Barbados where it rarely gets cold and rarely gets hot. Problem there is the tropical storms and hurricanes, so I guess there really isn’t any real paradise here on earth that is ideal for health.