A team from the Barcelona Institute for Global Health and the French National Institute of Health and Medical Research (Inserm), has carried out an analysis of hospital admissions related to high summer temperatures in Spain over more than a decade. The study concludes that the causes of hospitalization in which the heat has the most notable impact are: The research, published in Environmental Health Perspectives , included data of more than 11.2 million hospital admissions between 2006 and 2019.

Those data were restricted to emergency hospital admissions from 48 provinces in mainland Spain and the Balearic Islands and were provided by the Spanish National Institute of Statistics. The team also calculated the values of daily mean temperatures, daily mean relative humidity and concentrations of different air pollutants (PM 2.5 , PM 10 , NO 2 and O 3 ).

With the help of different models, they estimated the relationships between temperature and the different causes of hospitalization for the summer season (June to September) and by province. As expected, the statistical analysis showed that high temperature had "a generalized impact on cause-specific hospitalizations." Even though heat increased the risk of hospitalization in all age groups , children of less than 1 year of age and adults beyond 85 years were the most vulnerable groups, with higher risk of hospital admission.

Differences by sex were also found, since in hotter days men showed a higher risk of hospitalization fro.