Severe asthma has been shown to occur in the combined presence of high pollen and thunderstorms, termed thunderstorm asthma. Previous research has focused on rare ‘epidemic’ events, such as in Melbourne, 2016 where emergency room usage was 900% higher during a single thunderstorm asthma event. In this work, we investigate thunderstorm asthma conditions in the Twin-Cities metro region using detailed exposure estimates from a network of weather sensors along with daily pollen records, and asthma-related emergency department (ED) visits from 2007-2018.
First, we investigate the association between asthma-related ED visits and thunderstorm asthma conditions within a study radius of 20 miles from the Minneapolis-St. Paul (MSP) airport using a time series model approach. We evaluated risk for the entire study area combined and at the individual zip code level to investigate potential effect heterogeneity and spatial auto-correlation.
Next, we investigate relative and absolute risk disparities of thunderstorm asthma by age and sex subpopulations. We find evidence that thunderstorm asthma has impacts across the life course for men and women, with variation in risk by individual age-sex groups contrary to typical baseline asthma prevalence.
And last, we investigate the ability to leverage exposure information from a single pollen site in MSP along with site specific weather data and land-use covariates to estimate thunderstorm asthma associations at 19 communities across the state of Minnesota.