Climate changes and their effects in the public health: use of poisson regression models

Abstract

In this paper, we analyze the daily number of hospitalizations in São Paulo City, Brazil, in the period of January 01, 2002 to December 31, 2005. This data set relates to pneumonia, coronary ischemic diseases, diabetes and chronic diseases in different age categories. In order to verify the effect of climate changes the following covariates are considered: atmosphere pressure, air humidity, temperature, year season and also a covariate related to the week day when the hospitalization occurred. The possible effects of the assumed covariates in the number of hospitalization are studied using a Poisson regression model in the presence or not of a random effect which captures the possible correlation among the hospitalization accounting for the different age categories in the same day and the extra-Poisson variability for the longitudinal data. The inferences of interest are obtained using the Bayesian paradigm and MCMC (Markov chain Monte Carlo) methods.