Journal
INTERNATIONAL JOURNAL OF ENVIRONMENTAL RESEARCH AND PUBLIC HEALTH
Volume 15, Issue 3, Pages -Publisher
MDPI
DOI: 10.3390/ijerph15030406
Keywords
temperature-related mortality; distributed lag models; regional differences; meta-analysis
Funding
- Academy of Finland [278067]
- iSCAPE project (Improving the Smart Control of Air Pollution in Europe) [H2020-SC5-2015, 689954]
- URCLIM project (Urban Climate Services) - European Union [690462]
- Nordic Societal Security Programme
- Academy of Finland (AKA) [278067, 278067] Funding Source: Academy of Finland (AKA)
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The aimof this study was to assess regional differences in temperature-mortality relationships across 21 hospital districts in Finland. The temperature dependence of the daily number of all-cause, all-aged deaths during 2000-2014 was studied in each hospital district by using daily mean temperatures, spatially averaged across each hospital district, to describe exposure to heat stress and cold stress. The relationships were modelled using distributed lag non-linear models (DLNM). In a simple model version, no delayed impacts of heat and cold on mortality were taken into account, whereas a more complex version included delayed impacts up to 25 days. A meta-analysis with selected climatic and sociodemographic covariates was conducted to study differences in the relationships between hospital districts. A pooled mortality-temperature relationship was produced to describe the average relationship in Finland. The simple DLNM model version without lag gave U-shaped dependencies of mortality on temperature almost without exception. The outputs of the model version with a 25-day lag were also U-shaped in most hospital districts. According to the meta-analysis, the differences in the temperature-mortality relationships between hospital districts were not statistically significant on the absolute temperature scale, meaning that the pooled mortality-temperature relationship can be applied to the whole country. However, on a relative temperature scale, heterogeneity was found, and the meta-regression suggested that morbidity index and population in the hospital districts might explain some of this heterogeneity. The pooled estimate for the relative risk (RR) of mortality at a daily mean temperature of 24 degrees C was 1.16 (95% CI 1.12-1.20) with reference at 14 degrees C, which is the minimum mortality temperature (MMT) of the pooled relationship. On the cold side, the RR at a daily mean temperature of 20 degrees C was 1.14 (95% CI 1.12-1.16). On a relative scale of daily mean temperature, the MMT was found at the 79th percentile.
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