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When temperatures go up, emergency room doctors know they will be busy. A new study from the University of California San Diego and Stanford University backs that up. It looked at a decade of data from across California. NPR's Alejandra Borunda reports.
ALEJANDRA BORUNDA, BYLINE: Mary Meyer is an ER doctor in California's Bay Area. She works in several different emergency rooms around the region, and heat is always a problem, but the issues are different, depending on which ER she's at. For those that serve an older population, there's a clear pattern.
MARY MEYER: Chronic medical conditions get worse when it gets hotter. And the hotter it gets, the worse it gets.
BORUNDA: So she sees a lot of those older people.
MEYER: I'm going to see those patients coming into my ER, and it might be that their COPD is a bit worse.
BORUNDA: Or...
MEYER: It might be that they got a little bit dehydrated.
BORUNDA: Like, if they had kidney issues, for example. And then, sometimes...
MEYER: Unfortunately, I see a lot of patients with dementia, and they get a little more confused.
BORUNDA: In other ERs, Meyer sees a lot of kids come in. Just recently...
MEYER: I had a young woman come in with her 3-year-old son, and he's got severe asthma.
BORUNDA: The weather had been intense.
MEYER: And you throw in heat, you throw in poor air quality, and it gets worse.
BORUNDA: Meyer's experiences are validated in a new study published in the journal Science Advances. It found that emergency department visits in California scaled closely with temperature. So when it's hotter, the state sees a lot more people seeking health care, and the very young and the very old are most affected. Carlos Gould is an environmental health scientist at the University of California San Diego. He led the study.
CARLOS GOULD: Any hotter temperatures are going to push more people into the emergency department, which is already taxed and already oftentimes at capacity.
BORUNDA: The costs of those visits tally into the millions of dollars according to the study, and the expense is likely to boom in the future as climate change increases the frequency and intensity of heat.
Alejandra Borunda, NPR News. Transcript provided by NPR, Copyright NPR.
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