Time Lag Analysis in Health-Weather Effects

A review of health-weather effect research over the past few years indicates some effects are immediate and some may have a lag of up to 30 days. We found many lags in the 1 to 7 day range such as Ozone affecting Asthma in the 2-3 day lag (Li, Wang, etal, 2011) and temperature changes correlated with Pacemaker replacement with lags up to 30 days (Liu, Chang, etal, 2011) Of course, many environmental health effects have much longer time lags (air and water pollution, eg.). This paper is concerned only with fairly immediate effects that can be attributable to day-to-day weather and leaves the long term environmental effects to others. Our med-weather.com web site has attempted to show health effects such as asthma, cardio-vascular, arthritis, migraine, reaction-time and heat stress. We forecast from previous research but only use a 5 day forecast as the time-line for our effects. Many weather related effects may have longer lag time, so we will review the literature and discuss how we extended our weather analysis to account for this lag.