Weather patterns, air pollution influence risk for heart-related hospitalizations
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Key takeaways:
- Data show weather patterns and air pollution are associated with acute heart hospitalizations.
- Interactions become increasingly important with age.
Modeling data suggest that patterns of temperature, air pressure, precipitation and air pollution assessed over a decade are associated with hospitalizations related to HF, MI and ischemic stroke, researchers reported.
“There are many challenges in establishing an association between weather and cardiovascular risk,” Cedric Manlhiot, PhD, director of the Cardiovascular Analytic Intelligence Initiative and assistant professor of pediatrics at Johns Hopkins Medicine, and colleagues wrote in JACC: Advances. “One of the reasons for this is that many patient-level factors are also associated with hospitalizations for cardiovascular disease. In addition, the impact of weather could be relatively small to be identified in an insufficiently powered study. In order to obtain reliable results, the assessment of a large number of patients with cardiovascular disease and a long observation period are necessary.”
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In a population-based, cross-sectional study, Manlhiot and colleagues developed a comprehensive model of the association between weather patterns and the incidence of CV events, defined as hospital admissions and mortality related to HF, MI and ischemic stroke, to forecast near-term spatiotemporal risk for 24 million people in Canada from 2007 to 2017. Researchers assessed data for 1,192,601 patients who underwent 1,747,869 hospitalizations, including 922,132 admissions related to HF, 521,988 admissions related to MI and 263,529 admissions related to stroke. Researchers used data from the European Centre for Medium-Range Weather Forecasts products for the initial set of 17 weather and pollution variables.
“Since environmental factors might affect people of different ages differently, we modeled hospital admissions for the entire population and for five age groups (18 to 39, 40 to 49, 50 to 59, 60 to 69, and 70 years and older) separately,” the researchers wrote.
Researchers found that models that included weather and air pollution variables outperformed models without those covariates for most event types, with a stronger association between environmental factors and CV incidence observed with increasing age.
Researchers observed many influential variables and interactions. Among the overall population as well as with increasing age, the risk for HF hospitalizations was especially increased in conditions with low air pressure. The risk for MI depended on high air pressure (surface pressure lag) and increased precipitation as well as sulfur dioxide in interaction with temperature. The risk for ischemic stroke was higher with high air pressure, low evaporation and increased sulfur dioxide.
The weather and air pollution variables were predictive of the future incidence of HF, MI and ischemic strokes.
“Our prediction models showed good concordance of the observed and predicted spatiotemporal incidences, which means that establishing a forecasting system for acute cardiovascular events might be possible,” the researchers wrote. “Such a system would eventually allow health care systems to more efficiently allocate health care resources in period of high expected incidence.”
The researchers wrote that the study results only represent associations and none of the conclusions should be construed as representing causal relationships.
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