Key Takeaways:
- Heat and humidity can increase the severity of respiratory symptoms from irritants like pollution and allergens.
- Longer warm seasons and mild winters are making allergy season last longer.
- Use a weather app to check air quality.
- Shower or change clothes more frequently to remove pollutants from skin and fabric.
- Don’t forget about dust mites in your home, which thrive on heat and humidity.
Spring and summer mean more pollen and pollutants from increased automobile traffic and wildfires, but doctors say warm weather can exacerbate allergies and lung conditions, too.
Dr. Muhammad Mirza, a pulmonologist with Elliot Hospital, said all of these factors can make allergies more intense than in the fall and winter.
“New Hampshire can get those windy days [that] can have an effect on extending and prolonging the allergen exposure because they stick around in the air longer,” he said.
Mirza said high heat and increased pollutants from vehicles can increase the effect allergens have on the upper and lower airways.
An Huynh, an allergist at Dartmouth Health, said this time of year, tree pollen counts are high and sunshine is causing the plants and trees to bloom, increasing the pollen count.
Climate change is leading to longer growing seasons and milder winters, extending allergy symptoms, and increasing the geographic range of species that can cause allergies.
“With shortening frost, trees will start to pollinate a little bit earlier,” Huynh said.
Huynh said there’s also more overlap in seasons, leading to some of his patients reporting more intense allergies, as they are exposed to multiple allergens at once.
Practical Tips
Mirza said he asks his patients with lung conditions like asthma and chronic obstructive pulmonary disease to monitor air quality. He recommends using weather apps, which often have air quality index reports.
For someone with seasonal allergies, Mirza may recommend, depending on the severity of their symptoms, to start antihistamines before allergy season starts.
Mirza also recommends patients change clothes, and take more frequent showers when the pollen count is high, “because if you're sleeping with the pollen in your hair or your clothes throughout the night, you may be inhaling it and you may exacerbate symptoms the next day,” he said.
But heat and humidity levels play a part in how pollen and other irritants impact conditions like asthma and allergies. A lack of humidity and dryness in the air can cause the body to swell and produce more mucus.
“It can cause you to drain because that's your body's mechanism to re-moisten everything,” Huynh said.
While high humidity, he said, can make it harder to breathe and feel stuffy.
Huynh says people should also consider dust mites in their homes, which he said can contribute to allergies, and thrive in the humidity found in warmer seasons. Dust mites are prone to live in fabrics.
“Our bed sheets are a really common place that we can find dust mites,” Huynh said. “So when you're sleeping underneath the covers and you produce your own local microclimate of humidity from your own body heat, that's one of the big places that they can thrive.”
