Heatwaves admitting more children to hospitals everyday

As the weather becomes hotter, it is getting unbearable and triggering more hospital visits for children with asthma.

Parallel to summers, symptoms of the lung condition, such as breathlessness and wheezing, are usually associated with cold weather, according to NewScientist.

Morgan Ye at the University of California, San Francisco (UCSF), and her colleagues studied electronic health data from UCSF Benioff Children’s Hospitals in order to better understand the impact of hot temperatures.

The data consisted of records on asthma hospitalisations and the patients’ addresses.

To obtain temperature records at the patients’ homes every day from June to September between 2017 and 2020, the researchers used information from the PRISM Climate Group at Oregon State University.

The researchers described heatwaves in 18 different ways. 

They considered it a heatwave if it fell in the top 99% of these temperatures, or the top 97.5%, or the top 95%, and so on. They did this by looking at the range of temperatures that took place during these time periods.

These temperatures were associated with 19% higher odds, on average, of a child with asthma being admitted to hospital, compared with when there wasn’t a heatwave, as per the findings of the research.