Asian Dust Storm Events are Associated With an Acute Increase in Pneumonia Hospitalization

Abstract

This study aims to examine the association of Asian dust storm (ADS) events with the daily number of pneumonia admissions using 10-year population-based data in the Taipei metropolitan region. We identified 1,933,247 admissions with a principal discharge diagnosis of pneumonia between 2000 and 2009. The auto-regressive integrated moving average (ARIMA) method was used to examine the associations between ADS episodes and the logarithm of the daily number of pneumonia hospitalizations. There was a significant difference in the mean number of daily pneumonia admissions between ADS event days, post-ADS event days, and non-ADS event days (P < .001); the mean number of daily admissions for ADS event days, post-ADS event days, and non-ADS event days were 292.5, 305.7, and 279.0, respectively. After adjusting for the time-trend effect, ambient temperature, and SO(2), CO, and O(3), the ARIMA showed that compared with non-ADS event days, ADS event days and post-ADS event days 1 through 4 had a significantly higher mean number of pneumonia admissions for the total group. Our results suggest that ADS event days and post-ADS days 1 through 4 had significantly higher mean numbers of pneumonia admissions than non-ADS days.