A National Study on the Impact of Wildfire Smoke on Cause-Specific Hospitalizations Among Medicare Enrollees with Alzheimer’s Disease and Related Dementias from 2006 to 2016

Older adults may experience worse wildfire fine particulate matter (PM2.5) smoke-related health effects due to conditions such as Alzheimer’s disease and related dementias (ADRDs). We evaluated whether wildfire PM2.5 was associated with acute hospitalizations among older adults with ADRD, linking mo...

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Bibliographic Details
Published in:Fire (Basel, Switzerland) Vol. 8; no. 3; p. 97
Main Authors: Do, Vivian, McBrien, Heather, Teigen, Katharine, Childs, Marissa L., Kioumourtzoglou, Marianthi-Anna, Casey, Joan A.
Format: Journal Article
Language:English
Published: Basel MDPI AG 01.03.2025
Subjects:
ADRD
Adults
Age
Air pollution
Alzheimer's disease
Analysis
Anxiety
Chronic illnesses
Dementia
Disease
Emergency medical services
Environmental aspects
Health aspects
Hospital care
Hospitalization
Humidity
Identification methods
Indoor air quality
Medicare
Mental depression
Neurodegenerative diseases
older adults
Older people
Outdoor air quality
Particulate matter
Population
Postal codes
Poverty
Public health
Smoke
Temperature
VOCs
Volatile organic compounds
wildfire
wildfire smoke
Wildfires
United States
United States > US
ISSN:2571-6255, 2571-6255
Online Access:Get full text
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Summary:Older adults may experience worse wildfire fine particulate matter (PM2.5) smoke-related health effects due to conditions such as Alzheimer’s disease and related dementias (ADRDs). We evaluated whether wildfire PM2.5 was associated with acute hospitalizations among older adults with ADRD, linking modeled daily wildfire PM2.5 concentrations and circulatory, respiratory, anxiety, and depression hospitalizations from 2006 to 2016. We employed a case-crossover design and conditional logistic regression to estimate associations between lagged daily wildfire PM2.5 and hospitalizations. Also, we stratified cause-specific models by age, sex, emergency hospitalization status, and zip code-level urbanicity and poverty. The 1,546,753 hospitalizations among Medicare enrollees with ADRD were most coded for circulatory (71.7%), followed by respiratory (43.6%), depression (2.9%), and anxiety (0.7%) endpoints. We observed null associations between wildfire PM2.5 and circulatory, respiratory, and anxiety hospitalizations over the six days following exposure. Same-day wildfire PM2.5 was associated with decreased depression hospitalizations (rate ratio = 0.94, 95% CI: 0.90, 0.99). We saw some effect measure modifications by emergency hospitalization status and urbanicity. There were some stratum-specific effects for age, but the results remained mostly null. Future studies should use improved methods to identify ADRD and examine recent years with higher wildfire concentrations.
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ISSN:2571-6255
2571-6255
DOI:10.3390/fire8030097