Hospital admissions due to diseases of arteries and veins peaked at physiological equivalent temperature -10 to 10 °C in Germany in 2009-2011.

Abstract

We aimed to understand relationships of the weather as biometeorological and hospital admissions due to diseases of arteries and veins by subtypes, which have been scarcely studied, in a national setting in recent years. This is an ecological study. Ten percent of daily hospital admissions from the included hospitals (n = 1,618) across Germany that were available between 1 January 2009 and 31 December 2011 (n = 5,235,600) were extracted from Statistisches Bundesamt, Germany. We identified I70-I79 Diseases of arteries, arterioles and capillaries and I80-I89 Diseases of veins, lymphatic vessels and lymph nodes by International Classification of Diseases version 10 as the study outcomes. Daily weather data from 64 weather stations that covered 13 German states including air temperature, humidity, wind speed, cloud cover, radiation flux and vapour pressure were obtained and generated into physiologically equivalent temperature (PET). Two-way fractional-polynomial prediction was plotted with 95 % confidence intervals. For most of the subtypes from diseases of arteries and veins, hospital admissions slightly peaked in spring and dropped when PET was at 10 °C. There were no other large differences across 12 months. Admissions of peripheral vascular diseases, arterial embolism and thrombosis, phlebitis and thrombophlebitis, oesophageal varices and nonspecific lymphadenitis peaked when PET was between 0 and −10 °C, while others peaked when PET was between 0 and 10 °C. More medical resources could have been needed on days when PETs were at −10 to 10 °C than on other days. Adaptation to such weather change for health professionals and the general public would seem to be imperative.Electronic supplementary materialThe online version of this article (doi:10.1007/s11356-015-5791-x) contains supplementary material, which is available to authorized users.