The New Allergy Contributor
Researchers at Vanderbilt and Cornell University have found a new interesting factor to allergies. If you live in a bright city, the bright lights could make your allergies worse, since lights cause inflammation and nervous reflexes in your eyes and nose. Allergies cause the blood vessels in your eyes to swell, and the bright lights will cause more inflammation in your eyes. The lights will make your eyes have discomfort, pain, and might make you squint (a condition known as photophobia). Bright lights also make plants shed pollen longer and make it stronger with more allergenic proteins.
Bright lights alter the plant’s natural clock, making it inconsistent. They also cause the plants to bloom earlier and extend its reproductive phase, which produces more pollen. Plants rely on the sunlight to know when to bloom, release pollen, and start other cycles. All the bright lights can act as an alternative for plants, disrupting their natural rhythm. Artificial light at night can shorten their dark period, making them “rest” less. This fools the plant into believing it’s already the peak of summer, making it pollinate stronger and faster.
Plants use specialized light-sensitive pigments called phytochromes to measure the length of days and nights. Continuous or artificial exposure to light keeps these pigments in an active state, signaling to the plant’s internal clock to continue reproductive growth instead of going dormant. Research reveals that communities exposed to high levels of artificial light at night can have pollen seasons that last up to two months longer than those in naturally dark, rural areas.
The urban heat island effect, a phenomenon in which sunbaked buildings, roads and sidewalks absorb and then radiate heat, can also stretch the allergy season. When scientists plugged the allergy data into their model, they found out that light pollution was more likely to influence the pollen season than air temperature difference. However, not all plants are equally affected by light and air differences. Lime trees, for example, rely more on air temperature difference to make their pollen. Plane trees on the other hand rely more on light to help them pollinate. As a solution to the allergy problem, many people would want to cut down trees, but Dr. Daniel Katz, a researcher at Cornell University, says to plant more trees which pollinate less and are less dependent on light.
Research has found that our bodies can be more prone to allergies, and not only pollen allergies, if the night sky is bright. This is because it disrupts our Circadian clock, which powers our allergies. A recent analysis from the journal Allergy found that living in light-polluted areas is associated with a 62 percent higher risk of asthma and an 89 percent higher risk of allergic rhinitis, without counting air pollution.
Having allergies doesn’t mean you have to move away from the cities. Cities are working on planting better trees that don’t really rely on light and pollen as much. They are planning to adjust to brightness of street lights and billboards, which will help the trees rely on their natural pollen cycle. This means that you are not in the pollen battle, alone, as your city is helping to make the plants produce less, but at the right time.
