Heat-related mortality in Europe

Heat negatively affects human health and can be fatal. It can cause heat stress and dehydration, worsen heart, respiratory and kidney diseases, or even lead to heat stroke. The severity of adverse health outcomes is co-determined by the meteorological conditions, as well as age, pre-existing medical conditions and social deprivation as well as working and living conditions.

Caveats

The standard approach in timeseries studies of the health impacts of ambient temperatures is to calculate epidemiological models between daily temperatures and counts of death.26 Parallel analyses using daily mortality data from a large ensemble of European regions showed that annual heat related mortality incidences are systematically underestimated in the weekly data model (manuscript in preparation). These biases are however constant throughout the years, and therefore, the linear trends of annual heat related mortality incidences from the weekly data model are not biased. This result motivated the current definition of the indicator as the trend of the yearly timeseries of heat related mortality incidence, and not based on the annual values themselves.