A study released today by the Barcelona Institute for Global Health (ISGlobal) indicates that around 70 people may have died across Europe in 2022 as a result of extreme heat.
In a statement, ISGlobal explained that the investigation, published in the journal The Lancet Regional Health-Europe, revises upwards the estimates made so far about deaths associated with the record temperatures recorded in the summer of last year on the European continent.
The authors acknowledge that, in a study previously published in the journal Nature Medicine, the methodology used, based on weekly temperature averages, underestimated mortality attributed to heat, as daily data is needed to accurately estimate the impact of extreme temperature peaks. .
Published in July, this first investigation estimated the deaths of 62.800 people last year.
The researchers have now applied an exhaustive analysis of the data, collecting daily temperature and mortality series in 147 regions of 16 European countries between 1998 and 2004, and then comparing mortality estimates related to heat and cold at different classification levels: weeks , fortnights and months.
The data revealed differences in epidemiological estimates depending on the temporal scale of classification and confirmed that summarizing daily data over time periods longer than one day underestimates the impact of temperatures on mortality.
Specifically for the period between 1998 and 2004, the daily data model estimated mortality related to cold and heat at 290.104 and 39.434 premature deaths, respectively, while the weekly model presented values 8,56% and 21,56% lower for these two estimates.
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