The impact of heat waves on mortality.

ABSTRACT:

Background

Heat waves have been linked with an increase in mortality, but the associated risk has been only partly characterized.

Methods

We examined this association by decomposing the risk for temperature into a "main effect" due to independent effects of daily high temperatures, and an "added" effect due to sustained duration of heat during waves, using data from 108 communities in the United States during 1987-2000. We adopted different definitions of heat-wave days on the basis of combinations of temperature thresholds and days of duration. The main effect was estimated through distributed lag nonlinear functions of temperature, which account for nonlinear delayed effects and short-time harvesting. We defined the main effect as the relative risk between the median city-

SUBMITTER: Gasparrini A 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC3324776 | biostudies-literature | 2011 Jan

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature