Floods and cause-specific mortality in the UK: a nested case-control study

Floods are the most frequent weather-related disaster, causing significant health impacts worldwide. Limited studies have examined the long-term consequences of flooding exposure. Flood data were retrieved from the Dartmouth Flood Observatory and linked with health data from 499,487 UK Biobank participants. To calculate the annual cumulative flooding exposure, we multiplied the duration and severity of each flood event and then summed these values for each year. We conducted a nested case-control analysis to evaluate the long-term effect of flooding exposure on all-cause and cause-specific mortality. Each case was matched with eight controls. Flooding exposure was modelled using a distributed lag non-linear model to capture its nonlinear and lagged effects. The risk of all-cause mortality increased by 6.7