Abstract
Emergency room (ER) visits for accidental casualties, according to the International Classification of Deceases 10th Revision Chapters 19 and 20, include injury, poisoning, and external causes (IPEC). Annual distribution of 187,008 ER visits that took place between 2009 and 2011 in Beijing, China displayed regularity rather than random characteristics. The annual cycle from the Fourier series fitting of the number of ER visits was found to explain 63.2% of its total variance. In this study, the possible effect and regulation of meteorological conditions on these ER visits are investigated through the use of correlation analysis, as well as statistical modeling by using the Distributed Lag Non-linear Model and Generalized Additive Model. Correlation analysis indicated that meteorological variables that positively correlated with temperature have a positive relationship with the number of ER visits, and vice versa. The temperature metrics of maximum, minimum, and mean temperatures were found to have similar overall impacts, including both the direct impact on human mental/physical conditions and indirect impact on human behavior. The lag analysis indicated that the overall impacts of temperatures higher than the 50th percentile on ER visits occur immediately, whereas low temperatures show protective effects in the first few days. Accidental casualties happen more frequently on warm days when the mean temperature is higher than 14 °C than on cold days. Mean temperatures of around 26 °C result in the greatest possibility of ER visits for accidental casualties. In addition, males were found to face a higher risk of accidental casualties than females at high temperatures. Therefore, the IPEC-classified ER visits are not pure accidents; instead, they are associated closely with meteorological conditions, especially temperature.
Highlights
The increased attention to the adverse effect of meteorological conditions on human health has led to a continuous effort in exploring their intrinsic relationships
This study investigated the effect of meteorological conditions on IPEC-classified Emergency room (ER) visits
A strong relationship between temperature metrics and ER visits was revealed, even though the direct and indirect temperature effects were not able to be distinguished explicitly due to methodology and data limitation
Summary
The increased attention to the adverse effect of meteorological conditions on human health has led to a continuous effort in exploring their intrinsic relationships. A multitude of studies have assessed the influence of weather conditions on human mortality or morbidity for chronic or infectious diseases [1,2,3,4,5]. Few weather-health-related studies were found that have a focus on weather-related accidental casualties, which seem to happen unintentionally or from certain direct causes, such as traffic injury, assaults, or trauma. The accidental casualties of interest in this study include those classified according to Chapters 19 and 20 in the International Classification of Diseases. Res. Public Health 2016, 13, 1073; doi:10.3390/ijerph13111073 www.mdpi.com/journal/ijerph
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