Impact of weather changes on hospital admissions for hypertension

Abstract

Blood pressure (BP) shows a seasonal variation with higher levels at lower temperatures. Many hypertensives, however, report on BP disturbances rather in association with acutely changing weather conditions than with absolute temperatures. To date, the impact of changing meteorological parameters on hypertensive episodes remains elusive. We performed a retrospective time series regression analysis on 203,703 patients in three hospitals in Germany between 2010 and 2018, of whom 7362 patients were admitted for hypertensive disease. Numbers of daily admissions for hypertension were associated with metereological data obtained from three nearby weather stations. Data comprised temperature (mean, maximal, minimal and range within 24 h), athmospheric pressure, and precipitation. Changes of these parameters were calculated over a two and three day period. There was an inverse correlation between maximal daily temperature and the number of admissions for hypertensive disease, which remained significant both after adjustment for seasonality and week day in a spline model and in a constrained distributed lag model. A decrease of maximal temperature by 5 °C was associated with a 3% increase of risk for admission for hypertension and vice versa. There were no significant effects of precipitation and athmospheric pressure on the number of admissions. With regard to all observed metereological parameters, neither the change within two, nor within three days was consistently associated with the number of daily admissions. High temperatures are associated with lower numbers of hypertensive episodes requiring hospital admission. In contrast to the subjective perception of many hypertensive patients, however, acutely changing weather conditions are not associated with a higher risk of hypertensive emergency.

Figure 1

Mean annual course of (a) daily numbers of overall admissions, (b) daily numbers of admissions for hypertensive diseases, (c) daily mean temperature (T_mean), (d) change of temperature to the day before (ΔT_mean), (e) daily rainfall (R), (f) change of rainfall to the day before (ΔR), (g) daily mean athmospheric pressure (P), and (h) change fo athmospheric pressure to the day before (ΔP) between 2010–2018.

Figure 2

The association of daily maximum temperatures and the ratio of admissions for hypertension/ overall admissions.