This week, my wife and I both have had colds. Whereas she’s had a lot of congestion, I’ve had a nagging cough. While going through 10 bags of Kleenexes one thing I began to wonder yesterday was: Do people who get frequent respiratory infections (”colds”) have poorer lung function later on in life? In other words, is there a direct relationship between the number of colds you get over the course of your life and the functional level of your lungs once you reach old age?

If there’s a pulmonologist reading, please feel free to answer- but my bet was yes.

Coincidently, a very interesting study out of the Mayo clinic appeared in the news today discussing this phenomenon as it relates to the brain! From physorg.com:

Central nervous system infections such as the common cold could be linked to memory loss late in life.

The study basically suggests that each viral infection/cold you get leads to a little bit of damage to the hippocampus. The hippocampus, of course, is the memory engine of your brain. Over the course of a lifetime, the more colds you get, the more likely you’ll be to accumulate significant and noticeable damage to the hippocampus.

The authors of the study (published in Neurobiology of Disease) note:

We hypothesize that mild memory and cognitive impairments of unknown etiology may, in fact, be due to accumulative loss of hippocampus function caused by repeated infection with common and widespread neurovirulent picornaviruses

One also has to wonder: What about teenagers and young adults? Is a portion of their memory ability determined by how many (and how severe) colds they had as children?

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