The effects of weather on pediatric seizure: A single-center retrospective study (2005-2015)

Several studies have reported an association between seizure and the weather. However, reports are conflicting. Thus, we investigated whether emergency department visits due to seizure are affected by weather.

We retrospectively analyzed 108,628 emergency department visits to Samsung Changwon Hospital by pediatric patients from January 2005 to December 2015. Among them, there were 3484 (3.2%) visits for any type of seizure. Seizures were categorized as febrile seizure, afebrile seizure, epilepsy, or status epilepticus. We used a distributed lag non-linear model with quasi-Poisson distribution to investigate the association between weather and pediatric seizure.

During this 11-year study period, over the half of total pediatric seizure patients were febrile seizure (53.5%) and the proportion for status epilepticus were the lowest (5.9%). Mean of mean temperature and diurnal temperature range were 14.7°C and 8.3°C. Mean humidity was 62.1%, mean of atmospheric pressure was 1015.5hPa and mean of sunshine was 6.3Hr. When considering the overall 0-15days lagged effect of weather, only mean temperature was significantly associated with emergency department visits. At lower temperatures, the number of emergency department visits increases and decreases at higher temperatures. All 4 types of seizure also showed similar patterns. In particular, only visits of febrile seizure were significantly associated with mean temperature.

We investigated the association weather and pediatric seizure by considering 0-15day lags. In particular, low mean temperature increase the emergency department visits for pediatric seizure and high mean temperature decrease the pediatric seizure. In addition, only febrile seizure of 4 seizure types was affected by mean average temperature.