Changes of Circulatory and Nervous Diseases Mortality Patterns during Periods of Exceptional Solar Events

Abstract

A statistical analysis of the relation between exceptional solar events and daily numbers of deaths in the Czech Republic is presented. In particular, we concentrate on diseases of the nervous system (group VI from ICD-10—International Statistical Classification of Diseases and Related Health Problems 10th Revision) and diseases of the circulatory system (group IX from ICD-10). We demonstrate that the neurological diseases exhibit greater instability during the period of rising and falling solar activity. We study the daily numbers of deaths, separately for both sexes and two age groups (under 39 and 40+), during the Solar Cycles No. 23 and No. 24. We focus on exceptionally strong solar events in this period, such as the “Bastille Day event” on 14 July 2000, “Halloween solar storm” on 28 October 2003, and events on 7 January 1997, 2 April 2000, and on 7 September 2005. Special attention is paid to “St. Patrick’s Day storm” on 17 March 2015, the strongest geomagnetic storm of the Solar Cycle No. 24 that occurred following a coronal mass ejection (CME). We investigate the changes in the daily numbers of deaths during 1 month before and 1 month after these exceptional solar events. We take specific storm dynamics of their geophysical parameters into consideration. It has been verified that, for diseases of the nervous system, women are generally more sensitive than men. On the contrary, this differences between men and women have not been found for diseases of the circulatory system. Our findings suggest that the impact of the hazardous space weather conditions on human health depends on the specific dynamic and strength of the solar storm.

Geomagnetic and Cosmic Ray Activity Effect on Heart Rate during the Solar Cycle 24

“…Initially, the possibility of sungeophysical changes affecting the state of the human body had encountered skepticism from the scientific community [6][7][8]. However, since human populations' constant interaction with and influence by their environment has grown larger, and the need to thoroughly study space weather phenomena in relation to variations in the human physiological state has become imperative, many investigations have been conducted with irrefutable results [9][10][11][12][13][14][15][16].…”

Circulatory and Nervous Diseases Mortality Patterns—Comparison of Geomagnetic Storms and Quiet Periods

“…The computational procedure by this method is described in detail in [49], as a means to investigate the relationship between the Earth's ionosphere and magnetosphere. This method has been implemented in the field of the impact of space on human health, in [50] which also describes in detail the calculation procedures.…”

“…These time series were tested for independence and normality of logarithmic data series. The test of the normality of logarithmical series (and not of the series themselves) is the mathematical assumption for computing the maximum likelihood estimator of the constrained covariance matrix [50]. The data are transformed by differences of logarithms to fulfill the assumption of normality and independence of observed realizations within this step.…”

Study of space weather and its risks on human biologic processes

“…In Unger (2019) [1], research related to physical activity levels and human medical data has been reviewed, which shows that changes in the geomagnetic field, along with an increase in the activity level of cosmic rays, can have direct or indirect effects on human health and physiology. In Podolská (2021) [2] they analyzed the statistical analysis of the relationship between special solar events and the number of daily deaths in the Czech Republic.…”