Interdisciplinary Analysis of Annual Space Weather Activity in Relation to Mortality Associated with Cerebrovascular Disease: A Novel Model of Solar-Terrestrial Interaction

Abstract

A combination of heliobiological and biometeorological perspectives on human biology and epidemiology has recently yielded many intriguing results suggesting relationships with various measures of space weather. The convergence of empirical results with quantitative dimensional analyses has also proven incredibly effective in explaining similar results and in constructing new models of solar-terrestrial interaction. In the current study, we applied these approaches to the analysis of annual mortality rates associated with cerebrovascular diseases in Canada from 1979 to 2009 to determine potential overlap with our previous work on hypertensive disease mortality with heliogeophysical factors and derive values for constructing a novel model of solar influence on terrestrial biology. Annual cerebrovascular disease mortality displayed a strong non-linear trend over time. As suspected, correlation analyses with various measures of solar, geomagnetic, and cosmic ray features suggested a significant relationship between cerebrovascular mortality and the plasma beta function for solar wind pressures which was phase shifted by ~5 to 6 years. After removing a fourth-order polynomial trend from cerebrovascular data, the dominant cycle demonstrated was ~14.60 years, offset from the ~10.90 year cycle of the average plasma beta by approximately 6 years. Finally, we employed relevant values from these results for dimensional analysis using physical constants from physics, neuroscience, and astronomy in order to help describe an Earth-Sun circuit connected by magnetic flux lines through which pressure waves might propagate, resulting in a lagged or cumulative influence on cerebrovascular-related death.