The effect of weather on respiratory and cardiovascular deaths in 12 U.S. cities.

By A. Braga, A. Zanobetti, Jasmine Schwartz. Environmental Health Perspectives, 2002

625 citations recorded by the source corpus.

We carried out time-series analyses in 12 U.S. cities to estimate both the acute effects and the lagged influence of weather on respiratory and cardiovascular disease (CVD) deaths. We fit generalized additive Poisson regressions for each city using nonparametric smooth functions to control for long time trend, season, and barometric pressure. We also controlled for day of the week. We estimated the effect and the lag structure of both temperature and humidity based on a distributed lag model. In cold cities, both high and low temperatures were associated with increased CVD deaths. In general, the effect of cold temperatures persisted for days, whereas the effect of high temperatures was restricted to the day of the death or the day before. For myocardial infarctions (MI), the effect of hot days was twice as large as the cold-day effect, whereas for all CVD deaths the hot-day effect was five times smaller than the cold-day effect. The effect of hot days included some harvesting, because we observed a deficit of deaths a few days later, which we did not observe for the cold-day effect. In hot cities, neither hot nor cold temperatures had much effect on CVD or pneumonia deaths. However, for MI and chronic obstructive pulmonary disease deaths, we observed lagged effects of hot temperatures (lags 4-6 and lags 3 and 4, respectively). We saw no clear pattern for the effect of humidity. In hierarchical models, greater variance of summer and winter temperature was associated with larger effects for hot and cold days, respectively, on respiratory deaths.

Subfields: General Health Professions, Health, Toxicology and Mutagenesis

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/6988cd38775b895feae378ee92e2c10d59546e6a

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In General Health Professions

In Health, Toxicology and Mutagenesis

Citations in the corpus

Mapping Community Determinants of Heat Vulnerability (2008, methodology): “Modification of the relationship between heat and mortality by race, however, has not been found in all studies (Braga et al. 2002).”
Ambient Temperature and Morbidity: A Review of Epidemiological Evidence (2011, background): “, mortality displacement) has been documented by studies of heat-related mortality (Braga et al. 2002; Muggeo and Hajat 2009) that showed an immediate increase in mortality followed”
Weather-Related Mortality (2009, result): “here and in previous studies may provide a more complete assessment of temperature and mortality risk.(8,15)”
Population health effects and health-related costs of extreme temperatures: Comprehensive evidence from Germany (2018, background): “…support of the harvesting hypothesis that mostly older people die during heat waves—that is, people in weak health who would have died in the near future, regardless of whether there was a heat wave (Braga et al., 2001, 2002; Hajat et al., 2005; Stafoggia et al., 2009; Deschênes and Moretti, 2009).”
Effects of cold weather on mortality: results from 15 European cities within the PHEWE project. (2008, background): “Previous results have shown a prolonged effect of cold temperature on mortality (5, 22, 23), so it was decided a priori to use as an indicator for the exposure variable the mean for the current day and the previous 15 days (lags 0–15).”