Publications by authors named "Eva Plavcova"

Although impacts of extremely cold temperatures on human health have been widely studied, adverse effects of other extreme weather phenomena have so far received much less attention. We employed a high-quality long-term mortality time series (1982-2017) to evaluate impacts of extreme winter weather in the Czech Republic. We aimed to clarify whether compound events of extreme weather cause larger impacts on mortality than do each type of extreme if evaluated individually.

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Seniors constitute the population group generally most at risk of mortality due to heat stress. As life expectancy increases and health conditions of elderly people improve over time, vulnerability of the population to heat changes as well. We employed the years-of-life-lost (YLL) approach, considering life expectancy at the time of each death, to investigate how population ageing affects temporal changes in heat-related mortality in the Czech Republic.

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This study aimed to assess the impacts of heat waves during the summer of 2015 on mortality in the Czech Republic and to compare them with those of heat waves back to the previous record-breaking summer of 1994. We analyzed daily natural-cause mortality across the country's entire population. A mortality baseline was determined using generalized additive models adjusted for long-term trends, seasonal and weekly cycles, and identified heat waves.

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The study examines spatial patterns of effects of high temperature extremes on cardiovascular mortality in the Czech Republic at a district level during 1994-2009. Daily baseline mortality for each district was determined using a single location-stratified generalized additive model. Mean relative deviations of mortality from the baseline were calculated on days exceeding the 90th percentile of mean daily temperature in summer, and they were correlated with selected demographic, socioeconomic, and physical-environmental variables for the districts.

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The study examines effects of hot spells on cardiovascular disease (CVD) morbidity and mortality in the population of the Czech Republic, with emphasis on differences between ischaemic heart disease (IHD) and cerebrovascular disease (CD) and between morbidity and mortality. Daily data on CVD morbidity (hospital admissions) and mortality over 1994-2009 were obtained from national hospitalization and mortality registers and standardized to account for long-term changes as well as seasonal and weekly cycles. Hot spells were defined as periods of at least two consecutive days with average daily air temperature anomalies above the 95% quantile during June to August.

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Background: Many studies have reported associations between temperature extremes and cardiovascular mortality but little has been understood about differences in the effects on acute and chronic diseases. The present study examines hot and cold spell effects on ischaemic heart disease (IHD) mortality in the Czech Republic during 1994-2009, with emphasis upon differences in the effects on acute myocardial infarction (AMI) and chronic IHD.

Methods: We use analogous definitions for hot and cold spells based on quantiles of daily average temperature anomalies, thus allowing for comparison of results for summer hot spells and winter cold spells.

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Sudden weather changes have long been thought to be associated with negative impacts on human health, but relatively few studies have attempted to quantify these relationships. We use large 6-h changes in atmospheric pressure as a proxy for sudden weather changes and evaluate their association with hospital admissions for cardiovascular diseases (CVD). Winter and summer seasons and positive and negative pressure changes are analysed separately, using data for the city of Prague (population 1.

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The study examines the relationship between sudden changes in weather conditions in summer, represented by (1) sudden air temperature changes, (2) sudden atmospheric pressure changes, and (3) passages of strong atmospheric fronts; and variations in daily mortality in the population of the Czech Republic. The events are selected from data covering 1986-2005 and compared with the database of daily excess all-cause mortality for the whole population and persons aged 70 years and above. Relative deviations of mortality, i.

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