The Common Cold Can Disrupt Memory and Motor Skills, So Take A Day Off!

The next time you tell yourself, "It's just a cold I can still go to work," you might want to rethink that; especially if your work involves motor skills (airplane pilots, back-ho operators) or memory (auctioneers, actors.) Researchers at Cardiff University in the UK (land of the wicked head cold) have cleverly teased out the cognitive effects of having a cold, and it's not a pretty picture. They studied 200 people--48 developed colds while the rest served as controls--and found:

"Those with colds reported lower alertness, a more negative mood, and psychomotor slowing. They were also slower at encoding new information and slower on the verbal reasoning and semantic processing tasks." 

Perhaps even more fascinating, the study (published in the journal Brain, Behavior and Immunity) found that the changes in performance were not related to symptom severity. Possible explanations, posited by the researchers, include an increase in inflammatory proteins and neurotransmitter changes, both generated as part of the immune response. 

Mood, however, was indeed related to symptom severity...a universally known side-effect that hardly requires verification by science.