{"id":8084,"date":"2024-06-19T17:01:43","date_gmt":"2024-06-19T17:01:43","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/medexperts.pro\/?p=8084"},"modified":"2024-06-19T17:31:14","modified_gmt":"2024-06-19T17:31:14","slug":"how-heat-affects-the-brain","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/medexperts.pro\/?p=8084","title":{"rendered":"How Heat Affects the Brain"},"content":{"rendered":"
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High temperatures can make us miserable. Research shows they also make us aggressive, impulsive and dumb.<\/p>\n

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In July 2016, a heat wave hit Boston, with daytime temperatures averaging 92 degrees for five days in a row. Some local university students who were staying in town for the summer got lucky and were living in dorms with central air-conditioning. Other students, not so much \u2014 they were stuck in older dorms without A.C.<\/p>\n

Jose Guillermo Cede\u00f1o Laurent, a Harvard researcher at the time, decided to take advantage of this natural experiment to see how heat, and especially heat at night, affected the young adults\u2019 cognitive performance<\/a>. He had 44 students perform math and self-control tests five days before the temperature rose, every day during the heat wave, and two days after.<\/p>\n

\u201cMany of us think that we are immune to heat,\u201d said Dr. Cede\u00f1o, now an assistant professor of environmental and occupational health and justice at Rutgers University. \u201cSo something that I wanted to test was whether that was really true.\u201d<\/p>\n

It turns out even young, healthy college students are affected by high temperatures. During the hottest days, the students in the un-air-conditioned dorms, where nighttime temperatures averaged 79 degrees, performed significantly worse on the tests they took every morning than the students with A.C., whose rooms stayed a pleasant 71 degrees.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n

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A heat wave is once again blanketing the Northeast, South and Midwest<\/a>. High temperatures can have an alarming effect on our bodies<\/a>, raising the risk for heart attacks, heat stroke and death, particularly among older adults<\/a> and people with chronic diseases<\/a>. But heat also takes a toll on our brains, impairing cognition and making us irritable, impulsive and aggressive.<\/p>\n