Page 58 - Contributed Paper Session (CPS) - Volume 3

CPS1944 Oyelola A.
The weather-pneumonia associations varied across the regions of the
world. For example, positive association of temperature-pneumonia was
observed in Mediterranean climate of California, United States of America [3],
subtropical regions of China [4] and Australia [5, 6]. While in tropical regions
of South Asia and Sub-Sahara Africa, the disease is associated with wet-rainy
season (with less sunshine) [7-9].
The aspects of weather effects and seasonal variation of pneumonia has
been largely unexplored in Australia [10] with majority of the studies
conducted in the subtropical region [5, 6]. Wet-dry tropics North-East coastal
region of Australia is characterized by distinct wet and dry seasons with high
temperature throughout the year. Most of the rainfall in this region occurred
during the summer season with high temperature.
In this study, we investigated the influence of temperature and rainfall on
pneumonia in wet-dry tropics of North Queensland using a time series analysis
via distributed lag nonlinear model (DLNM) analysis of data-linkage data
between 2006 and 2016. The DLNM is a novel and flexible modelling structure
for dealing with lagged nonlinear relations between or among time series
structures. It will efficiently capture and control the behaviour of study
variables in the exposure range and time dimension. The results of the time
series analysis was used to identify vulnerable groups and estimates disease
burden attributable to varying exposure-lag-response relationships. Also,
given that pneumonia incidence is recorded throughout the year, adequate
and reliable quantification of exposure-response is of utmost importance.

2. Methodology
Data sources
The data used in this study was part of a data linkage project from a large
retrospective cohort of Townsville Hospital patients discharged with an ICD10-
AM code for an infectious disease from 1 January 2006 to 31 December 2016.
The use of ICD10-AM codes for infectious diseases have been shown to be
closely correlated with clinical diagnoses in Australian research [11, 12].
In this study, every patient hospitalized at Townsville hospital assigned
ICD10-AM codes J10.0* - J18* (a diagnosis of pneumonia including cases due
to influenza) were included in this study. Other variable extracted were age,
sex, indigenous status, admission source and presence of comorbidities.
Furthermore, individual pneumonia cases were aggregated to weekly data
to investigate seasonality of pneumonia and the role climatic variables. Data
on climate variables, daily mean temperature and daily mean rainfall were
obtain from Australian Bureau of Meteorological. Daily mean temperature was
averaged to weekly mean temperatures while daily mean rainfall was
aggregated to total weekly rainfall.

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