Brief Report

Aurelio Tobías, Ben Armstrong, Antonio Gasparrini
2017 Epidemiology  
Running head (up to 50 characters): Investigating minimum mortality temperature. ABSTRACT Background: The minimum mortality temperature from J or U-shaped curves varies across cities with different climates. This variation informs on adaptation, but ability to characterize it is limited by the absence of a method to describe uncertainty in estimated minimum mortality temperatures. Methods: We propose an approximate parametric bootstrap estimator of confidence interval (CI) and standard error
more » ... ) for the minimum mortality temperature from a temperature-mortality shape estimated by splines. Results: The coverage of the estimated CIs was close to nominal value in the datasets simulated, though SEs were slightly high. Applying the method to 52 Spanish provincial capital cities showed larger minimum mortality temperatures in hotter cities, rising almost exactly at the same rate as annual mean temperature. Conclusions: The method proposed for computing CIs and SEs for minimums from spline curves allows comparing minimum mortality temperatures in different cities and investigating associations of them with climate properly allowing for estimation uncertainty.
doi:10.1097/ede.0000000000000567 pmid:27748681 pmcid:PMC5380105 fatcat:uzrcq5ft2jg67dbiyxdcown3ca