4 Unexpected Ways Bad Weather Can Affect Your Health

When a storm approaches, do your knee joints hurt? Though your joints aren't the only part of your body influenced by the weather changes, you can thank it for the shift in barometric pressure.

The impact of weather on your body and the natural world is so diverse that it has its own scientific discipline: biometeorology. It's a tiny but diverse group of scientists who investigate how — and why — weather affects animals, plants, and humans. The weather has a wide range of effects on your health, from affecting symptoms of current disorders to contributing to new conditions (like high blood pressure, blood sugar changes, heart attack, chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (COPD)) and causing transitory physiological changes inside your body.

Read on to learn about some of the strange ways terrible weather impacts your body systems.

1. Joint stiffness
People can have an "old ticker" that anticipates a storm, which is accurate. Changes in atmospheric pressure do have an effect on our joints.

When the environment is heavier than normal or has higher pressure, it pushes against us from the outside, stopping our bodily tissue from expanding. Body tissue has more room to expand as air pressure drops, as it happens ahead of damp, rainy, or snowy weather. When this happens, it can push against our joints, producing aches and pains in some people, particularly those with injuries or arthritis.

2. Headaches
Bad weather can trigger headaches, and this isn't simply an urban legend. Indeed, in 2015, Japanese researchers discovered that headache drug sales were directly linked to dips in atmospheric barometric pressure, which is what happens when extremely terrible weather occurs.

There are two different mechanisms at work here. One has to do with the sinuses, which are four little air-filled chambers in the face's bones. When air pressure changes, people's ears "pop," and atmospheric pressure variations can cause an imbalance in sinus pressure, producing irritation and pain. This can range from forehead discomfort, pain between and behind your eyes, pain in your face, or a more diffuse headache in the front or rear of your head, depending on which sinus is most impacted. The particular structure of your head determines which headache you are more prone to.

Chewing gum is a good home remedy. It can help the pressure equalize in your sinuses through your mouth, nose, and Eustachian tube and may ward off a pressure headache. But if you have chronic inflammation, you may need more serious treatment, including sinus surgery or septoplasty.

3. Changes in blood flow in the brain
The sinuses aren't the only portion of your body affected by the pressure drop that provokes headaches caused by the weather. Another cause of headaches is the way pressure fluctuations influence blood flow in the cerebrovascular system, which regulates how blood circulates around your brain.

Because blood is particularly harmful to neurons, it's critical to keep blood away from the brain. The cerebrovascular system's blood vessels have receptors that activate if blood vessels widen excessively, acting as an early warning system that something is wrong. We experience pain as a result of this activation.

4. Spontaneous delivery
There is a link between a quick reduction in atmospheric air pressure and water breaking in pregnant women, often known as "spontaneous" birth, according to a seven-year study published in the journal Archives of Gynecology and Obstetrics by Japanese experts. The study concludes that there is a causal association between the number of ruptured fetal membranes, delivery, and barometric pressure, implying that low barometric pressure causes ruptured fetal membranes and delivery.