Impact of meteorological factors on hospital admissions for spinal diseases in Shanghai during 2015-2019

ABSTRACT

Purpose: To assess the correlation between meteorological factors and spinal disease admissions. Methods: Data was obtained from the electronic medical records of a tertiary general hospital. Meteorological data was collected from China Meteorological Science Data Sharing Service. Distributed lag nonlinear models were used to evaluate the impact of meteorological variables on weekly spinal disease admissions. Results: A total of 2739 spinal cases were documented. Compared with estimates at the 50^th, the cumulative relative risk (RR) for extremely high temperatures at the 97.5^th over lag week 18 to lag week 20 increased by 75.7%. When the weekly maximum temperature reached 38°C during lag week 20, the maximum RR was 1.96 (95% CI:1.095–3.506). Moreover, the effects of extremely high temperatures on spinal disease admissions were more obvious in females and the age group ≥65 years old compared with males and the age group<65 years old. Conclusions: Extremely high temperatures were significantly associated with higher risks of spinal disease admissions.

KEYWORDS:

• Spinal diseases
• admission
• meteorological factors
• distributed-lag nonlinear model

Acknowledgments

We thank the China Meteorological Science Data Sharing Service for providing meteorological data for our study.

Conflicts of Interest

The authors declare that they have no competing interests.

Ethical approval

All procedures performed in studies involving human participants were in accordance with the ethical standards of the institutional and/or national research committee and with the 1964 Helsinki declaration and its later amendments or comparable ethical standards. Informed consent was waived owning to the observational nature of this study.

Availability of data and material

The datasets used and/or analysed during the current study are available from the corresponding author on reasonable request.

Authors’ contributions

Miao-miao Yang contributed to the conception and design of the study, the interpretation of the data, drafting and revised the manuscript. Ying Zhang contributed to the data collection, the interpretation of the data, and reflective discussions on the analysis. Xiao-xing Jiang contributed to the conception and design of the study, the interpretation of the data, and the revision of the manuscript. Chao yuan contributed to the revision of the manuscript. All authors have approved the final manuscript as submitted and agree to be accountable for all aspects of the work.

Correction Statement

This article has been corrected with minor changes. These changes do not impact the academic content of the article.