Moderate hot rather than extreme hot is mainly responsible for temperature-related excess outpatient visits for respiratory diseases

Abstract

TPS 661: Climate change: temperature effects 1, Exhibition Hall, Ground floor, August 26, 2019, 3:00 PM - 4:30 PM Background: Much evidence has revealed that there are significant associations between ambient temperature and human health. However, few studies have assessed the health burden of respiratory disease attributed to different temperature ranges in subtropical region. Methods: Daily outpatient visits, weather variables and air pollution data were collected from January 2013 to July 2017 in a hospital of Dongguan city. A standard time series quasi-Poisson regression with distributed lag non-linear model (DLNM) was applied to estimate the associations between daily mean temperature and morbidity for respiratory diseases, bronchiectasis, chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (COPD) and asthma. Attributable risks were then calculated to quantify the disease burdens from different temperature components. Finally, a stratified analysis by age groups was conducted. Results: Both low and high temperature were associated with an increased risk of morbidity of respiratory diseases. Compared with the optimum temperature, the accumulative relative risk (RR) during 7 lag days was 1.13 with 95% confidence interval (CI) 1.01 to 1.26 for extreme hot, and 1.02 (95%CI: 0.99 to 1.05) for extreme cold. Respiratory morbidity risk for young population mainly caused by hot weather, but a reverse J-shaped was observed for the elderly. About 8.4% (95%CI: 2.8% to 13.3%) of respiratory morbidity was attributed to non-optimal temperature. Out of them, moderate hot was responsible for the major part of excess respiratory visits, accounting for 7.5% (95% CI: 2.4% to 12.2%) of respiratory morbidity. Conclusions: We found that moderate hot contributed most of excess respiratory outpatient visits caused by ambient temperature exposure in subtropical region, which indicates more attention should be paid to this temperature range rather than extreme temperature in subtropical regions.