Chilblains

What are they?

Chilblains are the painful inflammation of small blood vessels when your skin is repeatedly exposed to cold air.

What are the symptoms?

Small, itchy, red areas on your skin, often on your feet or hands, possible blistering or skin ulcers, a swelling or burning sensation in your skin, changes in skin colour from red to dark blue accompanied by pain.

What causes them?

No one knows exactly what causes chilblains. They may be an abnormal reaction of your body to cold exposure followed by rewarming. Rewarming of cold skin can cause small blood vessels under the skin to expand more quickly than nearby larger blood vessels can handle. This results in a bottleneck effect and the blood leaking into nearby tissues.

What’s the treatment? Chilblains will usually get better on their own. See your GP if the pain is unusually severe, you suspect an infection or if your symptoms aren’t improving after one to two weeks. Keeping the chilblains warm often soothes them as does rubbing them gently with mentholated ointment.

Your doctor may prescribe nifedipine, a type of blood pressure medication that opens up blood vessels and improves circulation, or a topical corticosteroid to help the chilblains heal.

How to prevent chilblains? Limit your exposure to the cold, wear thick socks and boots, look after your feet and walk around to improve your circulation. If your skin gets cold, it’s important to warm it up gradually.

It’s also important to keep your core temperature up with a hat, gloves and scarf.

My view of sleep is it’s like an essential vitamin, such as vitamin C. And like vitamin C we can’t store it, we need it every day, and if we go without it there are serious consequences.

Sleep is crucial to our health and many diseases are related to a lack of it – some of which may surprise you.

For instance, lack of sleep is related to an increase in appetite which leads to weight gain, possibly obesity and therefore to Type 2 diabetes and its complications such as eye problems, kidney disease and gangrene.

To that list add an increase of the risk of having a stroke.

Researchers have found a link between insomnia and serious health problems. Their theory is treating poor sleepers to help them get a good night’s rest to lower their risk of suffering a stroke or heart attack.

To test this out, neurologists examined almost half a million people with no history of stroke or heart disease and asked if they had any of three insomnia symptoms at least three nights a week.

These included having trouble falling or staying asleep, waking up too early and finding it difficult to focus during the day due to tiredness. It’s estimated that one in five adults will suffer sleeplessness at some point. More than 10 million prescriptions are written to tackle insomnia in Britain each year.

Of the 487,200 Chinese subjects in this latest study – average age 51 – 11% were unable to fall or stay asleep, 10% regularly woke up too early and 2% struggled to concentrate because they were tired. The subjects were followed for 10 years, in which time there were 130,032 cases of stroke, heart attack or other heart problems.

Researchers found people who had all three symptoms of insomnia were 18% more likely to suffer one of those conditions than people who had no symptoms. Those who had trouble falling or staying asleep were 9% more likely, while those who woke too early were 7% more likely. Those too tired to focus during the day were 13% more likely.

“The link between insomnia symptoms and these diseases was even stronger in younger adults and people who did not have high blood pressure at the start of the study, so future research should look especially at early detection and interventions,” Liming Li, of Peking University, said.

Professor Li pointed out the study didn’t prove lack of sleep caused the diseases but showed a strong link.

One in five adults will suffer from sleeplessness at some point