Emergency Room Visits: A New Way To Predict Thunderstorms?

It’s no “trick knee” but ED visits for respiratory complaints spike before thunderstorms. What’s going on?

Welcome to Impact Factor, your weekly dose of commentary on a new medical study. I’m Dr. F. Perry Wilson of the Yale School of Medicine.

I had a friend once who claimed it was his special ability to be able to tell exactly when it would start raining. Like he’d look up at the sky and say “in 90 minutes, it will be raining”. This is not the most useful of talents in the age of meteorology but nevertheless I thought of him as I read this study, appearing in JAMA Internal Medicine, which found that ED visits for respiratory complaints spiked before a thunderstorm.

This was a large study. Researchers led by Anupam Jena of Harvard used the Medicare fee-for-service database to capture beneficiaries’ ER visits for a respiratory ailment from 1999 to 2012. They then combined this data with US…