Physically equivalent temperature and mental and behavioural disorders in Germany in 2009–2011

AbstractBackground: We aimed to understand the relationships of the weather as biometeorological and hospital admissions due to common mental and behavioural disorders in a national setting in recent years.Methods: This is an ecological study. Ten percent of daily hospital admissions from the included hospitals (n = 1618) across Germany that were available between 1 January 2009 and 31 December 2011 (n = 5 235 600) were extracted from Statistisches Bundesamt, Germany. We identified F01-F51 mental ad behavioural disorders by International Classification of Diseases version 10 as the study outcomes. Daily weather data from 64 weather stations covering 13 German States including air temperature, humidity, wind speed, cloud cover, radiation flux and vapour pressure were obtained and generated into physiologically equivalent temperature (PET). We then plotted two-way fractional-polynomial regression.Results: For the most subtypes, the highest admissions were recorded in spring. There were small peaks in autumn...