During cold winter months (or in the heat of the summer when your AC is on), you may notice that the air in your home is dry. Just like very humid air could be bad news for your health, dry air may cause nose and eye irritation in otherwise healthy people. One solution is to use a humidifier if the air in your home is too dry. Below, you will learn how humidifiers work, the benefits of using one in your home, and how to choose the right one and use it correctly.

Humidity levels and health benefit

Very dry and very humid air can affect your health and the condition of your home. When air is too humid, it can encourage mold and mildew growth and contribute to health issues, as well as cause potential damage to your home. If you have asthma or another respiratory illness, dry air may make it worse.

The Cleveland Clinic reports that dry air may cause problems including:

Keeping the air in your home from becoming too dry may help with many of these health issues. Depending on where you live, controlling indoor humidity is not always easy. This is where a humidifier may offer benefits. It is best to keep your home’s humidity within an optimal range–not too high and not too low. The Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) recommends that you keep the air in your home between 30 and 50 percent humidity.

Benefits of using a humidifier during sleep

Humidifiers may be beneficial for adults and children during sleep. Sleep itself aids in repair, rejuvenation and maintenance of our immune system. Adding a humidifier to your bedroom can bolster the effects sleeping naturally provides. Here are some of the benefits you can get from sleeping with a humidifier in your room.

Humidifier benefits for snoring and sleep apnea

Humidifiers may help alleviate dry airways that cause snoring. Snoring results from a constricted airway, resulting in a dry mouth and relaxed throat. This dryness causes the respiratory airways to overcompensate by producing more mucus and therefore more constriction and likelihood of uttering an audible vibration such as snoring. Relieving the causes of snoring, such as dry airways, may help those sleep sounder as well (Stuck et al., 2015).

Habitual snoring could very well indicate an underlying problem such as sleep apnea. Typically this breathing condition would be treated with the use of a CPAP machine in the most severe of cases. Those with snoring issues or sleep apnea could benefit from adding a humidifier to the CPAP treatment. The American Sleep Apnea Association suggests adding a heated humidification (HH) with CPAP to mitigate some problematic features of the CPAP. However, research has shown that HH may not influence CPAP users to continue to use CPAP nor improve sleep itself, but it does improve naso-pharngeal symptoms. (Yu et al., 2012). Since the nasopharynx is part of the nasal cavity of our respiratory system, symptoms such as swelling of the lymph nodes or any other obstruction in this area may cause snoring. We can deduce that those who snore from a naso-pharngeal symptom, may find a heated humidifier useful.

Too much humidity can disturb sleep

Studies by NASA indicate that the ideal humidity level for the optimal sleep condition is between 50-60% (Flynn-Evans, Caddick & Gregory, 2016). Though there are benefits to using a humidifier during sleep excessive use may actually disrupt sleep patterns. For example, high humidity alters the perception of the room temperature of an enclosed room; the higher the humidity, the hotter the room feels to us. Conversely, if both humidity and heat are elevated, the sweat response will become disrupted, preventing the natural cooling relief of evaporation when we sweat. This can decrease REM and cause you to stay awake. (Okamoto-Mizuno & Mizuno, 2012)

Humidifier benefits for babies and children

For babies and young children, dry air could cause health issues. Using a humidifier may help keep the air within acceptable moisture levels. The main benefits of using a humidifier for babies and kids include:

Of course, your child does not need to be sick or have dry skin to possibly benefit from the use of a humidifier. Moist air in the right amounts may be beneficial for health and could potentially help keep them from getting sick.

Other humidifier benefits in your home beyond health

A humidifier may provide benefits to your home, as well.

Possible benefits of a humidifier in the spring and summer

Depending on where you live, the weather may have an impact on when the air in your home feels dry. For example, if you live somewhere with high levels of outdoor humidity, you probably run your air conditioner a lot in the summer. Air conditioning may dry out your home’s air. Using a humidifier may help counteract this. If you live somewhere with dry air, a humidifier might be good to use year-round.

Since pollen and mold counts tend to be higher in the spring and summer, using a humidifier in your home may also help keep your sinuses from becoming inflamed.

Which humidifiers to choose?

There are five main categories of humidifiers. Each works in a different way but the end goal for all of them—adequate moisture conditions in your home—is the same. The type you should choose depends on your needs. Let us take a look.

Pros and cons of using cool mist or warm mist humidifiers

Humidifiers release either warm or cool air to help add humidity to a room. Either type could be beneficial, though they each have pros and cons. Which you choose could depend on whether you have children or pets, how big your space is, and your personal preferences.

Some of the benefits and drawbacks of cool mist humidifiers include:

The benefits and disadvantages of warm mist humidifiers are:

Tips for using a humidifier in your home

Any time you use a humidifier, you should take care to use it properly. Not only will this extend the life of your humidifier, it can ensure that you and your home receive benefits and are not adversely affected.

It is clear that dry air can affect your health. Adding a bit of moisture to the air with a humidifier can be an easy solution to this problem. Take care not to use one excessively so that moisture levels are too high, which can encourage mold and dust mite problems. Using an air purifier at the same time can also help improve indoor air quality.

Breakthrough paves way for new Lyme disease treatment

A Virginia Tech biochemist has discovered the cellular component that contributes to Lyme arthritis, a debilitating and extremely painful condition that is the most common late stage symptom of Lyme disease, a press release said.

According to the release from Virginia Tech, the biochemist, Brandon Jutras, found that as the Lyme-causing bacteria borrelia burgdorferi multiplies, it sheds a cellular component called peptidoglycan that elicits a unique inflammatory response in the body.

“This discovery will help researchers improve diagnostic tests and may lead to new treatment options for patients suffering with Lyme arthritis,” said Jutras, lead author on the study. “This is an important finding and we think that it has major implications for many manifestations of Lyme disease, not just Lyme arthritis.”

Lyme disease is the most reported vector-borne disease in the country, and in Virginia reports have increased by more than 6,000 percent in the last fifteen years. The Centers for Disease Control, estimates that approximately 300,000 people are diagnosed with Lyme disease annually in the United States. Scientists predict that the number of people who become infected Lyme will increase as our climate continues to change.

Jutras — an assistant professor of biochemistry in the College of Agriculture and Life Sciences and an affiliated faculty member of the Fralin Life Sciences Institute — and his collaborators recently published their findings in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

According to the release, the PNAS paper was four years in the making, and Jutras began this research during his post-doctoral fellowship in the lab of Christine Jacobs-Wagner, a Howard Hughes Medical Institute Investigator and professor at Yale University.

“Nowadays nothing significant in science is accomplished without collaboration,” said Jutras. Co-authors on this paper ranged from bench scientists to medical doctors and practicing physicians. Dr. Allen Steere, a Harvard doctor who originally identified Lyme disease in the 1970s, assisted Jutras with his research and provided access to patient samples.

The research could provide a new way to diagnose Lyme disease and Lyme arthritis for patients with vague symptoms based on the presence of the cellular component called peptidoglycan in synovial fluid.

The press release said, the team found peptidoglycan is a major contributor to Lyme arthritis in late-stage Lyme disease patients. Peptidoglycan is an essential component of bacterial cell walls. All bacteria have some form of peptidoglycan, but the form found in the bacteria that causes Lyme, borrelia burgdorferi, has a unique chemical structure. When the bacteria multiply, they shed peptidoglycan into the extracellular environment, because its genome does not have the appropriate proteins to recycle it back into the cell.

Read: Every spot in Virginia is a hotspot for ticks

“We can actually detect peptidoglycan in the synovial fluid of the affected, inflamed joints of patients that have all the symptoms of Lyme arthritis but no longer have an obvious, active infection,” said Jutras in the release.

Peptidoglycan elicits an inflammatory response and the molecule persists in the synovial fluid, which means that our bodies continue to respond, without mounting a counter response.

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Receptors in our immune system sense bacterial products and, depending on the individual’s genetic predispositions, may determine how strongly a patient’s body reacts to peptidoglycan.

The next phase of Jutras’ work is to use methods to destroy the peptidoglycan, or intervene to prevent a response, which could get rid of Lyme disease symptoms. According to the release, Jutras predicts that with either therapy patients would start recovering sooner.

Clinical samples included in this study were obtained from patients that had confirmed cases of Lyme disease under the guidelines of the CDC, but virtually all did not respond to oral and/or intravenous antibiotic treatment, the release said. The presence of peptidoglycan in these patients’ synovial fluids may explain why some people experience symptoms of late stage Lyme disease in the absence of an obvious infection. In this case, the usual antibiotic treatments for Lyme disease would no longer be helpful, but this discovery might provide avenues for new treatments, the press release said.

Read: Risk of lyme disease is higher here. The effects can be devastating.

Members of the Jacobs-Wagner lab purified the peptidoglycan and removed all other bacterial components and asked: is peptidoglycan all on its own capable of causing arthritis in a mouse model?

According to the release, within 24 hours post-injection, mice presented with dramatic joint inflammation, indicating that peptidoglycan can cause arthritis.

Jutras is continuing his research at Virginia Tech on peptidoglycan by more thoroughly studying its chemical composition to determine how it is able to persist in the human body. This will also help further the understanding of how this bacterial product contributes to other manifestations of Lyme disease.

“We are interested in understanding everything associated with how patients respond, how we can prevent that response, and how we could possibly intervene with blocking therapies or therapies that eliminate the molecule entirely,” Jutras said.

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What should we know about health care in this community? Let health reporter Monique Calello know at mcalello@newsleader.com and follow her on Twitter and Instagram @moniquecalello.