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How people's health is affected

For the purpose of examining the effects of extremely hot and extremely cold weather on the risk of dying from heart disease, researchers from 35 different research institutes around the world have gathered one of the largest multinational datasets ever created. This study is pertinent to how people's health is affected by climate change, especially those who have cardiovascular problems.

Healthy persons can resist exposure to hot or cold environments and can tolerate a certain amount of internal temperature rise and fall. Clinical studies suggest that individuals with cardiovascular illnesses, however, are less resilient to such alterations. The cardiovascular system plays a crucial role in thermoregulatory functions; blood vessels expand in hot weather and constrict in cold. These processes may be disrupted in patients with weakened cardiovascular systems.

The examination of this global statistics, which was published in the American Heart Association's journal Circulation, revealed that days with the highest or lowest temperatures saw a greater number of heart failure deaths than days with more moderate temperatures. Extreme temperature was defined by the researchers as being at or below the "minimum mortality temperature," or the temperature at which the lowest fatality rate was recorded.

While various different types of heart illness were taken into account in this study, patients with heart failure were most likely to be adversely affected by extremely cold and extremely hot conditions. In the city of Baltimore, heart failure patients' mortality risk increased by 12 percent and by 37 percent, respectively, on days with exceptionally hot weather (above 86oF or 30oC) (below 20oF or -7oC).

The researchers found that for every 1,000 cardiovascular deaths:

• There were 2.2 more fatalities on days that were exceptionally hot (86°F/30°C or higher in Baltimore).
• 9.1 more people perished on days with extreme cold (below 20°F/-6.7oC in Baltimore).
• People with heart failure were shown to have the highest number of extra fatalities among all heart disorders (2.6 additional deaths on extreme hot days and 12.8 on extreme cold days).

Dr. Khraishah noted that although the cause of the more pronounced temperature effects in heart failure patients is unknown, it may be related to the disease's progressive nature. Only 20% of heart failure patients survive 10 years following diagnosis, and one out of every four patients with heart failure is readmitted to the hospital within 30 days of being discharged.

Over the previous four years, the heart disease mortality database for this study was built under the direction of Dr. Barrak Alahmad, research fellow at the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health. Additionally, associates from more than 35 scientific institutions around the globe worked together.

The group created and increased the Multi-Country Multi-City (MCC) Collaborative Research Network's heart disease mortality database. A group of epidemiologists, biostatisticians, and climate scientists is investigating how the environment, including the climate, has an impact on mortality rates.

According to one of the largest international datasets ever compiled, "this study demonstrates an irrefutable correlation between severe temperatures and heart disease mortality," said Dr. Mark T. Gladwin of UMSOM. To learn more about the role of health inequalities and genetic predispositions that make some groups more vulnerable to climate change, the data may be mined more thoroughly.

The researchers considered air pollution and humidity levels, which may have contributed to an increase in fatalities in areas with high temperatures. They also took into account the climate zone and the lag effect, which is the delayed impact of temperature on human health. They do admit that statistics on mortality from heart disease from South Asia, the Middle East, and Africa were underrepresented in their study, suggesting that the effect of high heat may really be far bigger than their findings suggest.

"This groundbreaking work is a call to investigate climate change as a potential cause of health disparities and underscores the need to see it as a major public health concern,"

Kuwait Foundation for Science Advancement provided funding for this analysis.