http://jech.bmj.com/content/67/2/125.abstract
Abstract
Objective
Asian dust storms (ADS) are long-ranged meteorological phenomena, which
are suggested to be associated with several health
problems. This study aimed to
investigate the risk of stroke hospitalisation following ADS events by
conducting a population-based
study.
Study design and setting
The authors identified 810 947 hospitalisations with an admission
diagnosis of stroke during the time period between 2000
and 2009 in Taiwan. The ARIMA method
(Auto-Regressive Integrated Moving Average) was used to examine the
associations between
ADS episodes and the daily number of
stroke hospitalisations.
Results
There were 46 separate ADS episodes which resulted in a total of 135 ADS
days between 2000 and 2009. The Kruskal–Wallis test
revealed that there was a
significant difference in the mean number of daily stroke admissions
among ADS days (239.6), post-ADS
days (249.2) and non-ADS days
(219.7) (p<0.001). After adjusting for the time-trend effect, ambient
temperature, season, SO2 and CO, the authors found post-ADS
days 1 and 2 to have a significantly higher number of stroke admission
than non-ADS days.
Post-ADS days 1 and 2 had
significantly higher numbers of ischaemic but not haemorrhagic stroke
admissions.