Climatic effects on hospital admissions

Many studies were conducted on the effects of climate change in diseases. In this study, we aimed to investigate the relationships between sex, age, climatic variables, and most common 20 reasons of hospital admissions. The study was conducted in a tertiary care hospital in Erzurum, a city at 1900m's altitude. The main study question was to compare mean temperature, humidity, and atmospheric pressure values for the most common 20 ICD10 diagnoses. Data for 148262 most common 20 reasons of application in the year 2009 was obtained from the main hospital registry and analyzed using the SPSS software. Climatic data for the same year was obtained from the Turkish State Meteorological Service. Mean age (+/- SD) was 46.21 +/- 17.6 years. The oldest person in the registry was 110 years old. Yearly averages (+/- SD) of temperature, dew point, humidity, atmospheric pressure, sunlight hours, and wind were 5.50 +/- 9.56 (028; 22) degrees C, 00.48 +/- 7.30 (031, 12) degrees C, 69.27 +/- 15.0 (31, 98) %, 1017.28 +/- 4.81 (1000, 1033) hPa, 9.07 +/- 2.12 (0; 10) hours, and 9.71 +/- 5.47 (2; 27) km/h respectively. ICD10 codes such as L30 and M25.5 were given more during the warmer days whereas M51.0, M51.1, and D64 were seen during colder days (p<0.001). Diagnoses with lowest dew point were M51.0 and R07.3 whereas L30 and M25.5 were encountered during higher dew point days (p<0.001). Erzurum shows some differences in the relationships of disease frequencies and climatic variables from the classical literature. Most strikingly, humidity and temperature may have inverse relationships in high altitudes with low water sources. Health professionals should take this into account when advising patients with diseases related with seasonal and climatic variations.