Know Your Cold

A chronic cold is different from a common cold.

A common cold is generally caused due to a viral infection, you have a running nose and watery eyes and it lasts for about a week.

In a chronic cold, you may usually feel it in the morning and it lasts for more than a week. Apart from that, it can also reoccur.

Reason

A chronic cold can happen due to two reasons:

• If your body has an allergy to something particular such as dust or a certain perfume.
  
  
• Due to environmental factors such as change in the climate or certain things in the weather not suiting you

Do Not Ignore

If your chronic cold goes untreated, it can lead to complications such as:

• Bronchitis. It generally refers to an acute inflammation of the air passages within your lungs.
  
  
• Acute sinusitis. It is a condition where the lining of your sinuses gets inflamed.
  
  
• Ear infection

This is because the ear, throat and nose are interconnected; and an infection in any one place can spread to the other three.

Precautions to Be Taken

Make sure you keep away from dust, quitting smoking and making sure that your AC is well filtered.

One of the best things to do is exercise as it improves your stamina. This will help your body overall and will definitely help your cold.

Get Yourself Checked

If you are in doubt about your condition, make sure that you get yourself checked. They would involve investigation of the blood, taking X-rays and checking your sinus.

Treatment

Your condition will normally go away with medication according to your problem. Unless you have some abnormalities you may have to undergo treatment.

Interesting Facts about Chronic Cold:

• Sometimes a chronic cold can be solved with something as simple as shifting your home to another place.
  
  
• You can develop a chronic cold if you are born with a certain nose abnormality.
  
  
• Chronic cold is not the same as having a sinus problem. However, it can be one of the causes of a sinus problem.

(With inputs from Dr. Nitin Devare, ENT Specialist and Dr. Sanglikar, Internal Medicine Specialist)