Background: The evidence and method are limited for the associations between mortality and temperature variability (TV) within or between days.
Objectives: We developed a novel method to calculate TV and investigated TV-mortality associations using a large multicountry data set.
Methods: We collected daily data for temperature and mortality from 372 locations in 12 countries/regions (Australia, Brazil, Canada, China, Japan, Moldova, South Korea, Spain, Taiwan, Thailand, the United Kingdom, and the United States). We calculated TV from the standard deviation of the minimum and maximum temperatures during the exposure days. Two-stage analyses were used to assess the relationship between TV and mortality. In the first stage, a Poisson regression model allowing over-dispersion was used to estimate the community-specific TV-mortality relationship, after controlling for potential confounders. In the second stage, a meta-analysis was used to pool the effect estimates within each country.
Results: There was a significant association between TV and mortality in all countries, even after controlling for the effects of daily mean temperature. In stratified analyses, TV was still significantly associated with mortality in cold, hot, and moderate seasons. Mortality risks related to TV were higher in hot areas than in cold areas when using short TV exposures (0–1 days), whereas TV-related mortality risks were higher in moderate areas than in cold and hot areas when using longer TV exposures (0–7 days).
Conclusions: The results indicate that more attention should be paid to unstable weather conditions in order to protect health. These findings may have implications for developing public health policies to manage health risks of climate change.
1Department of Epidemiology and Biostatistics, School of Public Health, University of Queensland, Brisbane, Australia; 2Department of Social and Environmental Health Research, London School of Hygiene & Tropical Medicine, London, United Kingdom; 3Health Impact Assessment Division, Department of Health, Ministry of Public Heath, Thailand; 4Institute of Environmental Assessment and Water Research, Spanish Council for Scientific Research, Barcelona, Spain; 5School of Epidemiology, Public Health and Preventive Medicine, University of Ottawa, Ottawa, Canada; 6Laboratory of Experimental Air Pollution, Department of Pathology, School of Medicine, University of São Paulo, São Paulo, Brazil; 7Department of Occupational and Environmental Health, School of Public Health, Peking University, Beijing, China; 8Graduate School of Public Health, Seoul National University, Seoul, Republic of Korea; 9Department of Pediatric Infectious Diseases, Institute of Tropical Medicine, Nagasaki University, Nagasaki, Japan; 10Faculty of Health and Sport Sciences, University of Tsukuba, Tsukuba, Japan; 11Department of Environmental and Occupational Medicine, National Taiwan University, Taipei, Taiwan; 12Department of Public Health, National Taiwan University, Taipei, Taiwan; 13Department of Environmental Health, Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health, Boston, Massachusetts, USA; 14School of Forestry and Environmental Studies, Yale University, New Haven, Connecticut, USA; 15Laboratory of Management in Public Health, Chisinau, Republic of Moldova; 16Division of Epidemiology and Biostatistics, School of Public Health, University of Hong Kong, Hong Kong, China; 17School of Public Health and Social Work, and 18Institute of Health and Biomedical Innovation, Queensland University of Technology, Brisbane, Australia
Recommended Citation:
Yuming Guo,1 Antonio Gasparrini,2 Ben G. Armstrong,et al. Temperature Variability and Mortality: A Multi-Country Study[J]. Environmental Health Perspectives,2016-01-01,Volume 124(Issue 10):1554