Social isolation and vulnerability to heatwave-related mortality in the urban elderly population: A time-series multi-community study in Korea.

Social isolation and vulnerability to heatwave-related mortality in the urban elderly population: A time-series multi-community study in Korea. Environ Int. 2020 Jun 24;142:105868 Authors: Kim YO, Lee W, Kim H, Cho Y Abstract Although several studies have reported that social isolation is one of the important health risk factors in the elderly population living in urban areas, its effects on vulnerability to heatwaves have been studied relatively less than climatic and other socio-economic factors. Thus, we investigated the association between social isolation levels and heatwave-related mortality risk in the elderly population in 119 urban administrative districts in Korea, using a time-series multi-city dataset (2008-2017). We used a two-stage analysis. In the first stage, we estimated the heatwave-related mortality risk in the elderly population (age ≥ 65) for each district using a time-series regression with a distributed lag model. Subsequently, in the second stage, we applied meta-regressions to pool the estimates across all the districts and estimate the association between social isolation variables and heatwave-related mortality risk. Our findings showed that higher social gathering and mutual aid levels were associated with lower heatwave-related mortality risk. Further, the lower percentage of single elderly households living in detached houses was also related to higher heatwave-related mortality risk. The association...
Source: Environment International - Category: Environmental Health Authors: Tags: Environ Int Source Type: research