Increase in heat exposure correlates with increase in hospitalization due to diabetes
Click Here to Manage Email Alerts
Every 5°C increase in daily mean temperature correlated with a 6% increase in hospitalization due to diabetes in Brazil between 2000 and 2015.
Further, the oldest patients were at an increased risk for diabetes-related hospitalization when exposed to heat.
“In recent years, numerous studies have suggested that climate change – especially global warming – is associated with morbidity from many noncommunicable diseases (NCDs). The impact of an increase in mean temperature on diabetes-related morbidity is unknown,”
Yuming Guo, MD, PhD, a professor in the department of epidemiology and preventive medicine at Monash University in Australia, and colleagues wrote. “To our knowledge, this is the first nationwide study to quantify the association between heat exposure and risk of hospitalization for diabetes over a 16-year period.”
In the nationwide case-crossover study, researchers assessed data on hospitalization for diabetes between Jan. 1, 2000, and Dec. 31, 2015, from 1,814 Brazilian cities. Researchers collected the daily minimum and maximum temperatures from a national meteorological data set to determine the impact of heat exposure on risk of hospitalization due to diabetes. Using a time-stratified case-crossover design, researchers measured the association between hospitalization for diabetes and heat exposure.
Between 2000 and 2015, a total of 553,351 hospitalization correlated with diabetes. Analyses revealed that every 5°C increase in daily mean temperature correlated with a 6% increase in hospitalizations due to diabetes. This association was greatest in patients at least 80 years of age.
“Our findings indicate that in the Brazilian population, short-term heat exposure during the hot season was significantly associated with greater risk of hospitalization related to diabetes. Overall, assuming a cause-effect relationship, we estimated that 7.3% of all hospitalizations associated with diabetes in the hot season could be attributable to heat exposure,” Guo and colleagues wrote. “These findings add to the expanding evidence base that climate change, and global warming in particular, is likely to have an increasingly important and detrimental role in human health over the coming decades.”
Collapse
Read more about
Click Here to Manage Email Alerts