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 (PM<sub>2.5</sub>) smoke-related health effects due to conditions such as Alzheimer’s disease and related dementias (ADRDs). We evaluated whether wildfire PM<sub>2.5</sub> was associated with acute hospitaliza...
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| Main Authors: | , , , , , |
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| Format: | Article |
| Language: | English |
| Published: |
MDPI AG
2025-02-01
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| Series: | Fire |
| Subjects: | |
| Online Access: | https://www.mdpi.com/2571-6255/8/3/97 |
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| Summary: | Older adults may experience worse wildfire fine particulate matter (PM<sub>2.5</sub>) smoke-related health effects due to conditions such as Alzheimer’s disease and related dementias (ADRDs). We evaluated whether wildfire PM<sub>2.5</sub> was associated with acute hospitalizations among older adults with ADRD, linking modeled daily wildfire PM<sub>2.5</sub> 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 PM<sub>2.5</sub> 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 PM<sub>2.5</sub> and circulatory, respiratory, and anxiety hospitalizations over the six days following exposure. Same-day wildfire PM<sub>2.5</sub> 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 |