Effect of different temperatures on hospital admissions for cardiovascular and cerebrovascular diseases: A case study

Abstract

Although many studies have explored the effect of temperature on cardio-cerebrovascular mortality, little evidence is available for that of morbidity, especially in China. In this study, the effect of mean daily meteorological temperature on daily hospital admissions for cardio-cerebrovascular diseases was evaluated by the distributed lag non-linear model on the basis of three years' data. Particularly, extreme hot and cold temperatures' influence was investigated by treating relative risks at the 1st and 99th percentile temperatures as cold and hot effect of temperature, respectively. Besides, the effect of modification by individual characteristics was also examined. Our results show that there are a J-shaped relationship between temperature and morbidity. Both hot and cold temperatures were associated with increased hospital admissions; however, their variation patterns are different as hot effect is immediate and of short term duration whereas cold effect could be delayed by about five days and would last for more than two weeks.