Does choice of outdoor heat metric affect heat-related epidemiologic analyses in the US Medicare population?

ABSTRACT: Outdoor air temperature is associated with increased morbidity and mortality. Other thermal indices theoretically confer greater physiological relevance by incorporating additional meteorological variables. However, the optimal metric for predicting excess deaths or hospitalizations owing to extreme heat among US Medicare beneficiaries remains unknown.

Methods

We calculated daily maximum, minimum, and mean outdoor air temperature (T), heat index (HI), wet-bulb globe temperature (WBGT), and Universal Thermal Climate Index (UTCI) for populous US counties and linked estimates with daily all-cause mortality and heat-related hospitalizations among Medicare beneficiaries (2006-2016). We fit distributed-lag nonlinear models for each metric and compared relative risks (RRs) at the 99th perc

SUBMITTER: Spangler KR 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC10402938 | biostudies-literature | 2023 Aug

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature