Association Analysis Identifies Risk of Ischemic Heart Disease When Temperature Increases

Abstract

The increase of mortality from ischemic heart disease has been considered to accompany falling temperature. The effects of temperature rise have been mostly neglected. The aim of this paper is to provide new insights into risk of ischemic heart disease when temperature increases. Many researchers used Poisson regression model to assess this sort of problems. Then, the cases of temperature rise were ignored as a random term in regression equations. In this article, we adopted association analysis, which highlighted the patterns of occurrence of ischemic heart disease when temperature increased. Association rule mining was performed using both daily data of emergency medical transport usage at Nagoya City in Japan and the data of weather information. The use of association analysis identified typical patterns among risky incidence of ischemic heart disease even when the weather became warmer in both winter and summer. The association rule method discovered also the importance of the weather pattern of the preceding day. These findings will suggest the existence of a mechanism, underlying the association of ischemic heart disease with a temperature rise and will contribute to better understanding for incidence of ischemic heart disease during both winter and summer.