The Relationship between Ambient Temperature and Sickle Cell Disease-Related Hospital Admissions in South Carolina
Year: 2020
Type: conference-abstract
Abstract: BackgroundSickle cell disease (SCD) is the most common inherited blood disorder in the United States and impacts millions of people globally. Climate change may significantly impact the health of these individuals; however to date, very limited research has examined the relationship between weather and sickle cell disease hospitalizations.MethodsWe evaluated the association between temperature and SCD-related hospital admissions among residents of South Carolina (SC) between 2003 and 2006. Daily temperature data were obtained from the US National Climatic Data Center for the most proximal weather station to each patient's residential address at the time of hospital admission. We restricted to first hospitalization for each patient. We used a semi-symmetric bidirectional case-crossover design to examine the relationship between hospital admissions and temperatures (continuous, extreme high and low temperatures) for 0 to 7 days prior (for case period) and an equivalent 7 days during the same month. Conditional logistic regression was used to estimate odds ratios (ORs) and 95% confidence intervals (CIs).ResultsAmong 1,937 individuals with at least one SCD hospital admission, the mean age was 24 years, and the median annual household income in the census tract of residence was about $37,000. The OR between hospital admission and temperature on the day prior to hospital admission was 1.01 (95%CI: 0.99,1.03), the OR for temperatures above 80 degrees F on the day prior was OR: 1.38 (95%CI:0.95,2.01), and for temperatures below 32 degrees F on the day was OR was 1.00 (95%CI:0.66,1.50). The associations for all other time windows that we investigated were similar.ConclusionsIn this dataset of SCD-related hospital admissions, we observed no strong relationship between temperature and hospital admission, however a weak positive relationship was observed for temperatures below freezing on days immediately prior to the hospital admission. Further investigation is warranted.
Source: ISEE Conference Abstracts
Authors: N. Crnosija, E. Rigterink, J. Yanosky, N. Sieck, R. Ezeugoh, T. Wen, R. Puett
Language: English
Subfield: Health, Toxicology and Mutagenesis
Field: Environmental Science
Domain: Physical Sciences
Open Access status: diamond
OpenAlex ID: W3166184642