About 1 In 100 Heart Disease Deaths Linked To Extreme Hot And Cold Weather Days

Exposure to extreme hot or cold temperatures increases the risk of death in heart disease patients, according to a new study published today in the Journal of the American Heart Association cycleA global analysis of more than 32 million cardiovascular disease deaths over 40 years shows that more people die on days with the warmest or coldest temperatures than on days with milder temperatures.

“It underscores the urgent need to develop measures to help our societies mitigate impact of climate change about cardiovascular disease,” said study co-author Dr. Haitham Khraishah, a cardiovascular disease researcher at the University of Maryland School of Medicine (UMSOM) and University of Maryland Medical Center (UMMC).

the type of Cardiovascular diseasespeople have heart failure most likely to be negatively affected by very cold and very cold hot day, compared with the optimal temperature day for a given city, the risk of death was 12% higher on days of extreme heat. Extreme cold was associated with a 37 percent increased risk of death from heart failure.

Findings based on analysis of more than 32 million health data cardiovascular death This happened in 567 cities in 27 countries on 5 continents between 1979 and 2019. The definition of extreme weather varies from city to city. It was defined as the top or bottom 1% of the “minimum mortality temperature,” which is the temperature at which the lowest mortality rate is achieved.

For every 1,000 cardiovascular deaths, the researchers found:

• Extremely hot weather (above 30°C (86°F) in Baltimore) resulted in 2.2 deaths.
• Extremely cold days (below 20°F (-6.5°C) in Baltimore) resulted in 9.1 deaths.

Of the types of heart disease, those with heart failure had the greatest number of additional deaths (2.6 extra deaths in extreme hot weather and 12.8 extra deaths in extreme cold weather).

“While we don’t know why the effect of temperature is more pronounced in patients with heart failure, it may be due to the progressive nature of heart failure as a disease,” Dr. Khraishah said. “A quarter of heart failure patients are readmitted within 30 days of discharge, and only 20 percent of heart failure patients survive 10 years after diagnosis.”

Climate change has been found to cause extreme weather to appear at opposite ends of the spectrum, with hotter summers and colder winters.2021 research published in the journal science Warming of the Arctic found to cause shifts in events leading to disruption of polar vortex leading to cycle extremely cold in the northern hemisphere.

Barrak Alahmad, MD, Ph.D., a research fellow at the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health at Harvard University in Boston and a faculty member at the Kuwait University School of Public Health in Kuwait City, is the study’s corresponding author. Over the past four years, Dr. Khraishah and Dr. Alahmad have worked with their colleagues from more than 35 institutions around the world to create a cardiac mortality database for this study.

The team developed and expanded the cardiac mortality database as part of the Multi-Country Multi-City (MCC) Collaborative Research Network.This is a team of epidemiologists, biostatisticians and climate scientist Study the impact of climate and related environmental stressors on health die rate.

“This study provides information on temperature extremes and Heart Mortality from disease from one of the largest multinational datasets ever created,” said Mark T. Gladwin, MD, president of UMSOM, vice president for medical affairs and John Z. and Akiko K. Bowers Distinguished Professor at the University of Maryland, Baltimore. Digging deeper into the data to learn more about the role of health disparities and genetic predispositions that make certain populations more vulnerable to climate change. “

According to Dr. Khraishah, these questions will be addressed in future research.

Some limitations of the study include underrepresentation of data from South Asia, the Middle East and Africa. Due to a lack of data, the impact of extreme heat may be greater than initially measured.

The researchers took into account humidity and air pollutants, which may be responsible for the excess number of deaths in regions with extreme temperatures.They also controlled for delay effects temperature superior human health (hysteresis effect) and climate zone.

“This landmark paper calls on people to climate change as a growing public health problem and underscores the need to investigate it as an underlying cause of health disparities,” said Stephen N. Davis, MBBS, chair of the Department of Medicine at UMSOM and chief physician at UMMC.