Climatic factors influence on emergency department visits

Abstract

Creative Commons Non Commercial CC BY-NC: This article is distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 License (http://www.creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/) which permits non-commercial use, reproduction and distribution of the work without further permission provided the original work is attributed as specified on the SAGE and Open Access pages (https://us.sagepub.com/en-us/nam/open-access-at-sage). Dear Editor, We read with great interest the editorial by Lim, Balsari and Hung recently published on Hong Kong Journal of Emergency Medicine.1 We do agree with the authors as they state that emergency physicians play a major role in preparing the communities for the challenges related to the climate change. In particular, we believe that emergency departments (EDs) offer a unique point of view on the health need of the population; moreover, the correlation between climatic factors and daily ED visits may represent a good model to understand the impact of climate on human morbidity.2 Thus, we conducted the analyses to determine the relationship between climatic factors and ED visits; we performed a retrospective study at the Santa Croce e Carle teaching hub hospital in Cuneo, north-west of Italy, over a 2-year period (1 January 2018 to 31 December 2020). Adults presenting to the ED for several pathologies were included. Data on mean barometric pressure, temperature and rain or snow were collected daily from a weather station located 1 km from the hospital. The relationship of daily or between-day (interday) changes in climatic factors and ED visits was evaluated using time series analysis. In the studied period, there were 151,787 total ED visits; here, we report all the correlations with a statistical significance (i.e. p ⩽ 0.05). Negative interday difference in barometric pressure, lower values of barometric pressure and lower temperature were associated with a decrease in daily ED accesses; in addition, we observed fewer ED accesses during rainy or snowy days. Lower temperature and negative variations in barometric pressure were associated with more ED admissions for respiratory diseases (asthma and chronic obstructive pulmonary disease exacerbations and pneumonia). Besides, we observed a positive correlation between barometric pressure differences and presentations for stroke; finally, lower values of barometric pressure were associated with a greater number of visits for psychiatric disorders. In conclusion, we can state that a correlation between weather factors and ED visits exists; this correlation is particularly strong for respiratory diseases. In the editorial’s conclusion, Lim and colleagues wonder if Emergency Medicine is ready to face the greatest challenge of our times. We believe that an important step is rising awareness among the society that climate is a fundamental determinant of health; fully understanding the interaction between climate and human morbidity may represent a way for coping with climate change.