Leslie Lane: Welcome to Premier Health Now On Air where today we have timely health tips you'll want to know for spring, and they're straight from the source. We're glad you're along. I'm your moderator, Leslie Lane. With me today is Dr. Mark Williams, a primary care physician with Beavercreek Family Medicine. Thanks for joining us.
Dr. Mark W.: Thank you, Leslie. It's great to be here today.
Leslie Lane: Spring is in the air.
Dr. Mark W.: Thank goodness.
Leslie Lane: Everything is waking up. There's more daylight. The plants are starting to bud. The bugs are coming out of hibernation, good times. Today we're talking about how the change to daylight savings time affects us, about allergies here in the heart of allergy country, and how spring cleaning maybe can help. As we turn our clocks ahead an hour and spring forward to enjoy that extra evening light, let's take a moment to thank Benjamin Franklin. Daylight savings time was his idea originally to help Parisians to save money on candles. Now we're using LEDs, but the idea stuck. You wouldn't think though that losing an hour would have much effect, Dr. Williams. Does it?
Dr. Mark W.: Our clocks are very tied to how much we sleep and also are affected by daylight. It can have a pretty significant effect on a number of people. Probably some tips to get through it would be good sleep hygiene habits. One of the most important things is for you to be able to go to bed and get up at the same every day. The idea of hey, I'm going to sleep in on the weekend and catch up on my rest, really, actually may be detrimental for you. Your body likes things to be the way they are all the time, what we call homeostasis. Getting in bed at the same time every night, getting up at the same time every morning, and trying to get at least seven to eight hours of sleep a night has really been shown to be the best thing. Daylight savings time is a bit of a challenge, as it is for all of us. My recommendation would be that you just continue to follow your good sleep hygiene habits. It might take a day or two for you to get back into the rhythm, but it will pass. Your body will adjust to that.
Leslie Lane: What kind of effects do you see from daylight savings time disruption?
Dr. Mark W.: Sleep deprivation of any kind or any change in your sleep cycle can affect your mood. It can affect how you perform at work or how you perform with your family. It can affect how you think. It can have sometimes fairly profound effects on people. How you drive is very important. How much sleep you get is important to your performance, how you drive and perform other physical tasks. It's not something to be taken lightly. Sleep is very, very important to our recovery every day.
Leslie Lane: We turn our clocks back usually when we go to bed on a Saturday night or back or forward now. It's forward this time. How long would we expect these effects to last? We've got Sunday to get over it. Is that good enough, or is Monday still going to be a hard day?
Dr. Mark W.: I think it varies with people. Most people are probably going to feel it for a day or two and then get back into the normal rhythm. I wouldn't expect a profound effect for a week or anything.
Leslie Lane: What's going on in the body that disrupts us so?
Dr. Mark W.: Your brain is very sensitive to light. There's a part of your brain that's sensing the light that's coming through your eyes and setting up your circadian rhythm, which is how your brain ... It's like your brain's internal clock. When there's a disruption in that pattern, it has to reorganize itself in order to get used to the new pattern. It's really the light that's the effect, similar to why people get seasonal affective disorder, some people do. Seasonal affective disorder is a disorder when people can get depressed usually in the winter. We think that has a lot to do with the light perception. As the daylight gets shorter, your brain is very sensitive to that. Some people, it can have profound effects on their mood. That's also why light therapy works for seasonal affective disorder. Light is important.
Leslie Lane: The best recommendation is keep to your sleep pattern, it will be fine.
Dr. Mark W.: Yes, that's what I would say. I think that's probably the easiest thing to do. Yes.
Leslie Lane: Okay. Close on the heels of daylight savings time is allergy season.
Dr. Mark W.: Yes.
Leslie Lane: The Asthma and Allergy Foundation ranks our region as the most challenging area in the Midwest spring or fall. Dayton itself consistently ranks in or near the top 10 American cities for seasonal allergies. Any idea what's going on here?
Dr. Mark W.: I think there's probably a number of factors. One is there's lots of things that are blooming all the time. They bloom one right after the other. You got flowers, and you got pine trees. You got trees, and you got grasses. Really, things are blooming and producing pollen through mid-summer. The other is the river. It's fairly wet around here generally, which lends itself to increased mold production. That's also spring and fall allergies. Some people believe it's the weather pattern here. We talk about Sinus Valley in Dayton, Ohio. There's probably some truth to that, and that Dayton pretty much sits in a bowl. Weather patterns can affect, wind patterns, et cetera can affect how pollen is distributed around and whether it gets blown out or not.
Leslie Lane: You know if you have allergies. You know because there's the itchy eyes, and the runny nose, and the scratchy throat, maybe even hives, so help us. Is there anything we can do knowing that that's coming?
Dr. Mark W.: I'm an allergy sufferer myself and have been lifelong allergy sufferer. This is a big topic for me, personally. My recommendation is if you're going to use an allergy product over the counter, I would start early before you start having symptoms. What I recommend to my patients, if it's spring allergies, I ask them to start the medication usually April the 1st. If its fall allergies, I usually ask them to start on August the 1st. Fall is usually ragweed. Spring is all the flower pollens and tree pollens. What you want to do is you want to take your medicine to tamp down your immune system because the immune system is the problem. That's what causes your allergy symptomatology.
My go-to is nasal steroids. There's multiple over-the-counter products with nasal steroids. The reason I like them is they're safe. They're easy to administer. They're once a day, and there's no systemic effects. They don't give you the fatigue and tiredness that sometimes antihistamines can give you.
Leslie Lane: What do they do?
Dr. Mark W.: Nasal steroids, they stabilize the membranes of some of the immune cells that cause the release of chemicals in your body that cause the symptomatology. Getting ahead of that is really important. Using a nasal steroid will usually take a week or so to get the full effect. If you start before your symptoms, you're much more likely to be able to head them off when things start blooming. That's my recommendation.
Leslie Lane: Your go-to is nasal steroids. Anything else?
Dr. Mark W.: Certainly, over-the-counter antihistamines, the nonsedating ones like Claritin. Loratadine is the generic name. Allegra, Zyrtec are also good. They are pills, so there's a potential for systemic effects, especially Zyrtec can make you a little sleepy as opposed to the Claritin and Allegra. I like Zyrtec, if you really have severe symptoms, especially itching, because it does a great job with itching. For nasal symptoms and actually eye symptoms as well, again, I prefer nasal steroids.
Leslie Lane: What if allergy season starts early and catches me off guard? Then what do I do about all those nasty symptoms?
Dr. Mark W.: Just start on your medicine as quickly as you can. The other thing, if you're really sensitive to outdoor allergies, is as much as we all like to open our windows in the spring and let all the sunshine and fresh air in, that's also sucking in all of those allergens. Keeping your windows closed. Some people use HEPA filters in their house. Some people even run their air conditioners even when they don't have to cool down their house, but just to filter the incoming air to your home to try to keep those allergens where they belong, which is outside.
Leslie Lane: Does it ever make sense to consider getting tested when it's seasonal allergies?
Dr. Mark W.: It can. My recommendation for my patients is if we cannot control your symptoms using what we talked about, the nasal steroids or antihistamines, it might make sense to be tested. Allergies are a scale of severity. Some people have minor symptoms. Some people have really significant symptoms. Some people have symptoms despite our best efforts to treat them. Some people don't want to take pills or any kind of medicine. In those cases, I think it makes sense to do that, be tested. It will help you avoid the known allergens as well as you might want to consider doing immunotherapy with an allergist to try to decrease your sensitization to your allergens.
Leslie Lane: You talked about shutting the windows. I wonder if I'm unwittingly bringing in stuff with me or my pets because we're outdoors. I have seen my car covered in yellow pollen. I come in the house, and there it is all over me. I'm just spreading it around.
Dr. Mark W.: No, I think you're right. There's no doubt. If you're outside, we've all seen the cars covered with yellow pollen. If your pets are outside there, carrying it around with them when they come in. The big dog comes in and shakes in the kitchen when you let him in. He's flinging pollen all over the place. The question is, is there anything we could do about that? I'm not aware of any science that would point to a solution, but it would make sense that frequently vacuuming your house, making sure that the filters of your vacuum cleaner are cleaned on a regular basis. If you have a bag in your vacuum, make sure you're getting rid of that every time that you use your vacuum. Some people vacuum their pets. I'm not sure about that. My dog seems to like being vacuumed. Maybe that would work as well. Certainly, showering and trying to keep the pollen off you makes perfectly good sense.
Leslie Lane: Dust and mold are also allergy sources that know no season. The other fun thing about spring is spring cleaning. If we're going to do a thorough spring cleaning, do you have any tips for getting after those kind of culprits?
Dr. Mark W.: I think removing clutter from your house, certainly items that are sitting around for a long period of time, they're gathering dust. I know when I go home and look at my desk, I'm thinking there's a lot of dust on my desk because I let things sit there and gather dust. Certainly, that's going to trap some of those allergens especially as it relates to dust mites. Removing clutter is a good idea. Again, vacuuming on a regular basis and making sure that the vacuum filters are cleaned on a regular basis because yes, they'll trap all those allergens, but if you don't clean the filters, they're going to be blowing the air right back around your house again.
If you have a particular sensitivity for dust mites, there are products that you can get to try to help with that like keeping your pillows in a dust mite protected cover, making sure you're changing your bedding regular because dust mites love to hang out in your bed. Other tips would be wiping down surfaces, not only to remove the dust and the allergens but also just to thorough cleaning in regard to bacteria and viruses. I think cleaning on a regular basis makes perfectly good sense.
Leslie Lane: One last question about spring cleaning. If you could hire somebody to take on your least favorite spring cleaning chore, and we're talking windows, kitchen, bathrooms, mopping, dusting, what would that be?
Dr. Mark W.: Probably gutter cleaning and windows. People, I think, underestimate the danger of being on a ladder for cleaning out your gutters or cleaning high windows. It would be a lot cheaper to hire somebody to do that who has the proper equipment than it would be to get up there on a ladder, and then fall off, and break a leg, or a pelvis, or get a head injury. That's my go-to. I don't do gutters, don't do windows.
Leslie Lane: You are with the majority of people in the American Cleaning Institute study who all said windows, forget it. I'm going to hire somebody.
Dr. Mark W.: Yes.
Leslie Lane: We are a few weeks away from the official beginning of spring, but we hope this conversation has given you a head start to enjoy all that comes with a new season and warmer weather. We thank our guest today, Dr. Mark Williams, primary care physician with Beavercreek Family Medicine. If you want to know more, visit premierhealth.com/healthnow. We'll be back, we hope you will. I'm Leslie Lane. Thanks for joining us and watch for our next edition of Premier Health Now On Air.
