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The flu season has nearly ended (phew!), but you’re still sneezing and feeling grotty. Could your symptoms be due to an allergy rather than a cold? How can you tell the difference?
Really by process of elimination and keeping careful note of what symptoms you get and when they occur.

If you get the symptoms at the same time of year each year (usually when the seasons change) then it’s more likely to be an allergy. People tend to associate allergies (in the form of hay fever) with springtime, when the flowers bring on runny noses and streaming eyes, but actually falling leaves in Autumn and freshly-mown grass in Summer are just as likely to get you reaching for the tissues.

There are allergens that can be present all-year round, of course, so if you’re snuffling all the time, you should look closer to home – it could be that you’re allergic to dust mites present in your mattress or soft-furnishings.

If it’s only during the Winter months that you’ve been suffering, it is likely that you’ve had a succession of cold viruses, particularly if they were preceded by a few days or weeks of feeling off-colour and then last for a week or so.

Allergic reactions tend to come on quite suddenly but can last for a long time if the allergen isn’t identified and removed.

Colds may leave you feeling bunged up and give you red, watery eyes, but your eyes won’t normally itch with a cold. On the other hand, allergic reactions can often be most severe when they reach your eyes, leaving you with very itchy, sore and even blistering eyes.

Finally, allergies don’t normally give you a fever or a runny nose that is green/yellow in colour.

If you think you may be suffering from an allergy, the only way you can be sure is to have an allergy test, which is normally done by skin-prick test where suspected allergens are placed on your skin to see if they cause a reaction.

The severity of your symptoms can determine whether you can get one of these on the NHS, but ask your GP for advice.

With the government continually trying different initiatives to try to reduce alcohol consumption amongst us Brits, you might wonder what the problem is with having a drink. We’re all adults, after all, and surely we can choose what goes into our bodies and in what quantities?

Well, the government isn’t really interested in saving us from ourselves, it’s more interested in trying to save the NHS some money. After all, you only need to visit an Accident and Emergency department for a short period of time to see how many patients are treated as a result of alcohol consumption – whether that’s through excessive consumption and alcohol poisoning, fighting, domestic abuse, road accidents or trips and slips when inebriated. Visit the other wards in a hospital, and you’ll see even more people who are suffering the long-term effects of alcoholism and excessive alcohol consumption.

But even if you don’t drink to excess, alcohol does have a negative effect on your body. If you’re under 21, your brain is still developing and drinking alcohol (especially to excess) can actually damage your brain.

Lesser, but still significant, are the other effects on your body that you may not associate with alcohol consumption. Alcohol is a stimulant and it dehydrates your body. Doing so can give you wrinkles and fine lines, or it can cause bloating as your body tries to preserve its stores of liquid. Your veins and blood vessels are dilated by alcohol, and can become prominently visible (rosacea, or ‘drinker’s nose’).

Alcohol is calorific. It contains 700 calories per 100g. It also lowers your blood sugars, increasing your appetite (hence the otherwise mysterious allure of the kebab shop).

It’s not all bad, of course – alcohol can reduce the risk of heart disease if drunk in moderation. Whilst the current guidelines say that men should drink no more than 21 units per week and women 14 units, it is hoped that these guidelines will change to reflect the need for those units to be consumed over several days (not in a binge session, and not every day).

Heart disease is the UK’s number one natural killer, and it is known to be caused by several factors, including genetic and environmental influences.

At one point, scientists believed that the fact that more men than women suffer from heart disease might have something to do with risk factors associated with the Y chromosome. The Y chromosome is male – men carry XY chromosomes, whereas women carry XX – and so scientists began looking closely at the Y chromosome to see if there was some variation on it that might explain why so many men (compared to women) developed the disease.

The research that led from that supposition looked at over three thousand men and considered links between their genetic type (having one of several possible variations on the Y chromosome, called haplogroup I) and their risk of developing heart disease. The research found that men with one particular variation on their Y chromosome were 56% more likely to develop heart disease than men with other types of variation. This was regardless of other factors like weight, lifestyle and socio-economic factors.

So it seems from the research that Y chromosome genes might significantly increase a man’s risk of developing heart disease. However, lifestyle and socio-economic factors do still play a part – just because a man is genetically predisposed to developing a certain disease it doesn’t mean he will do so, because he can take steps to improve his general health (e.g. stopping smoking, losing weight, taking more exercise) and take steps to avoid this largely preventable disease.

The research has been carried out by the Universities in Leeds, Glasgow, Leicester and Cambridge and at King’s College London, and further universities across the globe. The researchers made it clear that being part of this haplogroup I is not a predictor of developing heart disease on its own – there are many factors that make it more or less likely that a person will develop the disease. The key is to take care of yourself and your heart – eating healthily, stopping smoking, drinking in moderation, taking regular exercise. If you have any concerns, speak to your GP.

It has been known for a long time that drinking milk (coupled with an intake of Vitamin D, either from food, vitamins or the sun) will strengthen bones because of the high level of calcium it contains.

There have also been recent claims that drinking even a glass of milk a day could improve your brain, boosting memory and preventing dementia. These claims are based on findings that people who drank milk or ate yoghurt performed better on memory and brain-function tests than did people without that level of dairy products in their diets.

However, those findings are merely correlational, not causal. In other words, they may show that the two things happen together (i.e. that people who drink milk do better in the tests) but not that it they did better in the tests because they drink milk. There could be lots of other factors that made those people do better in their tests – they could have been from better socio-economic backgrounds, for example.

The findings were made by the University of Maine and the University of South Australia. They were released to the press by the National Fluid Milk Processor Promotion Board, which promotes milk consumption in the US on behalf of their government.

The researchers actually say that their research provides an association between consuming dairy and having improved cognitive function. They say that it might help because it has a ‘favourable effect’ on things like obesity.

The research certainly doesn’t prove that drinking milk improves brain power or reduces the risk of dementia. Dairy products are good for keeping your bones and teeth strong and healthy, but they as an animal product they are also high in saturated fat that can lead to heart disease and obesity.