Potential impacts of weather and climate slow variations on human health and wellness. Current perspectives
An analysis of modern population studies of the effect of variations in atmospheric factors on people's health and morbidity in different regions of the world is carried out. This analysis showed the relativity, non-linearity, non-monotonicity of the meteorological effect, the existence of a significant time lag in its development, as well as the dependence of the degree of its manifestation from the season of the year and the geographical location of the place of residence. The severity of the meteorological effect depends on the person's age and gender, possibly race, nutrition, social status, lifestyle. Most of the works recognize atmospheric temperature, its current values and the amplitude of variations as the most biotropic factor. It is not correct to talk about the nature of the meteorological effect in relation to "cardiovascular diseases" in general, since the profiles of the relative risk of developing diseases fundamentally depend on specific concomitant nosology. However, there is another problem: the difference in individual sensitivity to meteorological factors, as a result of which participants in a single group of patients can react differently to the action of the same factor, up to the difference in the sign of the bioeffect. We also summed up the results of publications on an individual approach to the analysis of healthy volunteers of different latitudes, conducted over 15 years, which showed that: • in high and middle latitudes, the dominant factor affecting 60-90 % of the population is atmospheric temperature; in southern latitudes - the temperature and atmospheric pressure; • the sign of correlation with temperature in the northern latitudes was always negative, in the middle and southern latitudes - both signs were found; • the sign of correlation of blood pressure with temperature in one person may vary in the ranges above and below zero degrees; • it is shown that one of the atmospheric biotropic factors may be the partial oxygen content in the air; • two different-direction types of individual response of blood pressure indicators to changes in air temperature were obtained in the region above zero degrees. The existence of these two types explains why the probability of detecting a statistically significant meteorological effect for healthy people by the average group blood pressure values is practically zero everywhere except in sufficiently northern latitudes. So the population-based approach has a number of methodological limitations that can be largely overcome by adding an individual approach to it.