Climate change linked to brain disease and headaches

Rising temperatures have made many people feel worse

A team of researchers led by the University of California, Los Angeles, says climate change and its impact on weather patterns and severe weather events will have a negative impact on the health of people with brain diseases.

Photo: freepik.com

In a paper published in The Lancet Neurology, the team highlights the urgent need to understand the impact of climate change on people with neurological diseases to keep them healthy and prevent the disease from getting worse.

After analyzing 332 papers published worldwide between 1968 and 2023, the researchers, led by neurologist Sanjay Sisodia, said they expect significant large-scale potential impacts of climate change on neurological diseases.

They looked at 19 different nervous system diseases selected from a 2016 study, including stroke, migraine, Alzheimer's disease, meningitis, epilepsy and multiple sclerosis. The team also analyzed the impact of climate change on several serious but common mental disorders, including anxiety, depression and schizophrenia.

“There is clear evidence of the influence of climate on some brain diseases, especially stroke and infections of the nervous system. Climate changes that have been shown to have an impact on brain disease include extreme temperatures as well as greater temperature fluctuations throughout the day, especially when these rates were unusual across seasons,” Sisodia said. He added that nighttime temperatures may be especially important because higher temperatures during the night can disrupt sleep, which can worsen brain health.

Researchers found that with higher ambient temperatures or extreme heat, the number of hospitalizations, disability or death due to stroke.

Meanwhile, the team argues that people with dementia are susceptible to harm from extreme temperatures and weather events because cognitive impairment may limit their ability to adapt behavior to environmental changes.

“Decreased awareness of risk is coupled with a reduced ability to seek help or mitigate potential harm, for example by drinking more in hot weather or adjusting clothing. This susceptibility is exacerbated by frailty, multiple medical conditions, and use of psychotropic medications. Accordingly, greater temperature fluctuations, hotter days, and heat waves lead to increases in dementia-related hospitalizations and deaths,” the researchers explained.

The researchers note that as severe weather events increase and global temperature, the population is exposed to deteriorating environmental factors that were not severe enough to affect brain health in some of the earlier studies they reviewed as part of the analysis. As a result, they said, it is important to ensure that the data is up-to-date and takes into account not only the current state of climate change, but also the future.

Sanj Sisodia warned: “This work is being carried out in the context of alarming deterioration in climate conditions, and it must remain flexible and dynamic if we are to produce information that is useful to both individuals and organizations. Moreover, there are few studies assessing the health consequences of brain diseases under future climate scenarios, making forward planning difficult.”