The climate impact on female acute pyelonephritis in Taiwan: A population-based study

Urinary tract infection (UTI) is the main reason of community-acquired infection which causes large losses in social economy. The individual as well as climate factors make changes on the incidence. Acute pyelonephritis (APN) is one of the most serious UTI in female. The object of our study is to analyze whether climate factors will have effect on the incidence of female APN in Taiwan.

This study consisted of 14,568 female patients with APN from 2001 to 2013 in Taiwan and patients with repeated APN were excluded. The monthly climate data was collected from the Central Weather Bureau. The available monthly climate data included highest, lowest, and average level of temperatures, humidity, rainfall, total rain days, and sunshine hours.

The total incidence of female APN was 23.44 each 10,000 populations. The incidence of APN was positively correlated with temperature (r = 0.66), sunshine hours (r = 0.45), rainfall (r = 0.42), rain days (r = 0.29), and humidity (r = 0.23) per month. There is the strongest correlation between the average monthly temperature and the incidence of APN (β = 0.54). The correlation with the incidence of APN was also followed by rain days (β = 0.28) and humidity (β = 0.27).

There is a significant expression on the incidence of female APN affected by seasonality and climate parameters. The monthly average temperature has the strongest correlation with female APN. The results of this research may facilitate the potential preventive strategies on female APN.