Association of temperature variability with daily hospital admissions, length of hospital stay, and hospital cost for cause-specific cardiovascular and respiratory disease

Few studies have comprehensively measured the impact of temperature variability (TV) on hospital admissions, length of hospital stay (LOS) and hospital cost for multiple cardiovascular and respiratory diseases in the same population. We collected daily hospital admissions, LOS, and hospital cost for cause-specific cardiovascular and respiratory disease from the Beijing Medical Claim Data for Employees between 2010 and 2017. The associations between TV and cardiovascular and respiratory disease were examined with overdispersed Poisson models. A generalized additive model was employed to quantify the associations between LOS and hospital cost and TV. Total of 1,523,571 hospitalizations for cardiovascular and respiratory disease were identified during the study period. We found that short-term exposures to TV were associated with increased cardiovascular and respiratory disease admissions. For a 1 °C increase in TV0–1, we observed significant increases of 2.76% (2.69%–2.84%) in hospital admissions for all cardiovascular diseases, 3.16% (3.04%–3.28%) in hospital admissions for all respiratory diseases. The largest estimates were observed at exposure for 0–6 days. For each 1 °C TV increase, the absolute increase with LOS increased 11.27 days (95% CI: 5.86 to 16.68) at lag 0–6 for respiratory disease. Our findings suggest that TV was significantly associated with cardiopulmonary health and the corresponding substantial LOS.