Weather and air pollutants have an impact on patients with respiratory diseases and breathing difficulties in Munich, Germany

Abstract

This study determined the influence of various meteorological variables and air pollutants on airway disorders in general, and asthma and/or chronic obstructive pulmonary disease in particular, in Munich, Bavaria, during 2006 and 2007. This was achieved through an evaluation of the daily frequency of calls to medical and emergency call centres, ambulatory medical care visits at general practitioners, and prescriptions of antibiotics for respiratory diseases. Meteorological parameters were extracted from data supplied by the European Centre for Medium Range Weather Forecast. Data on air pollutant levels were extracted from the air quality database of the European Environmental Agency for different measurement sites. In addition to descriptive analyses, a backward elimination procedure was performed to identify variables associated with medical outcome variables. Afterwards, generalised additive models (GAM) were used to verify whether the selected variables had a linear or nonlinear impact on the medical outcomes. The analyses demonstrated associations between environmental parameters and daily frequencies of different medical outcomes, such as visits at GPs and air pressure (-27 % per 10 hPa change) or ozone (-24 % per 10 μg/m(3) change). The results of the GAM indicated that the effects of some covariates, such as carbon monoxide on consultations at GPs, or humidity on medical calls in general, were nonlinear, while the type of association varied between medical outcomes. These data suggest that the multiple, complex effect of environmental factors on medical outcomes should not be assumed homogeneous or linear a priori and that different settings might be associated with different types of associations.

Neighborhood-Level Factors Related to Asthma in Children Living in Urban Areas

“…Research of outdoor air-quality ranges from analyzing pollen exposure related to asthma emergency department (ED) visits (Jariwala et al, 2011) to the impact of weather (Wanka et al, 2014) and particular air pollutants (Buonanno, Marks, & Morawska, 2013; Glad et al, 2012; Nishimura et al, 2013; Svendsen et al, 2012; Vieira et al, 2012) on asthma and respiratory health. Some of the research has mixed results.…”

Using a generalized additive model to quantify the influence of local meteorology on air quality in Zagreb

“…As statistical models able to simulate nonlinear relationships by smoothing concurrent input variables (Hastie and Tibshirani, 1990;Hastie et al, 2009), GAMs are suitable for a wide range of environmental issues and have thus been used in many recent studies (e.g. Schlink et al, 2003;Aldrin and Haff, 2005;Ito et al, 2007;Zhang and Batterman, 2010;Pearce et al, 2011;Chen et al, 2012;Gonzales et al, 2012;Munir et al, 2013;quisthoudt, 2013;Otto et al, 2014;Wanka et al, 2014). According to Schlink et al (2003), GAMs performance is comparable to those of neural network models, and, GAMs are applicable for ozone forecasting, for which purpose they (as well as the neural network approach) outperform linear forecasting techniques.…”

Effects of contamination and climate in the Pediatric Emergency Department visits for acute respiratory infection in the City of Buenos Aires

“…Most studies have been conducted in Europe or the United States of America (USA), but their results may not be extrapolated to our setting due to differences in pollutants, climatic aspects, and the health status of the exposed population. 8,9 There is local evidence that air pollutants, in combination with climate, may constitute a health hazard in the adult population. 10 It is necessary to assess the impact of these outcome measures on the health of particularly vulnerable subgroups.…”