00:00Today we'll look at two new studies about how heat impacts human health.
00:05Brad, our first study is from the Keck School of Medicine at USC that focused on temperatures,
00:10especially overnight temperatures, and the negative impact on sleep.
00:14Absolutely, and I know personally I do not like a hot bedroom, so I like it nice and
00:20cool.
00:21But studies very interesting found that, again, sleep length was clearly reduced in hot weather,
00:28especially along the west coast of the United States, mostly impacting people with chronic
00:33health issues, lower socioeconomic status.
00:38Females were more likely than males to be affected, and Hispanics.
00:41Talk a bit about how they did this study and what type of time period they looked at and
00:45how they came up with this data.
00:46Yeah, so they collected data from 2010 through 2022, analyzed 12 million nights of sleep.
00:54That's a lot of sleep, by all I know of that.
00:56So what they found was by 2099, average loss of sleep could be as much as 8 to 24 hours
01:03each year, which doesn't sound like much, but let's break it down further.
01:06Let's break it down by the warm months.
01:08We have about 3 or 4 warm months, so that comes out to about 4 to 12 minutes per day of sleep
01:12loss.
01:13And that may not just be every day.
01:14There may be some days that are hotter, which you might lose more sleep in.
01:17And obviously heat or temperature, rather, of the environment is very important to sleep
01:22and how the body reacts during sleep, right?
01:23Yeah, absolutely.
01:24Very, very important.
01:25It prevents the body from cooling down, of course.
01:27And then when you do that, you reduce your deep sleep, reduce REM sleep, and that leads
01:33to more health issues, potentially.
01:35So certainly some mitigation areas that need to be focused on more green space, more air
01:39conditioning, heat resistant, building design, all ideas to help continue to mitigate impacts
01:44of a warming world on overnight temperatures.
01:47Our second study from New York University on excessive heat and young child development
01:51and how it negatively impacts the development, especially in that 3 to 4 year old range.
01:55Yeah, 3 to 4 year old, very critical age for development here.
01:58And what they found was children exposed to average temperatures above 86 degrees Fahrenheit
02:04were 5 to 6.7% less likely to meet developmental milestones such as reading and numbers.
02:13So that's very interesting.
02:14That is a very interesting finding from the study.
02:16Where did they look at, or what countries were studied, and what types of data did they use?
02:19Yeah, several countries in Africa, Gambia, Georgia, Madagascar, and again, not all in
02:25Africa.
02:26Spread it out a bit.
02:27But again, countries that were typically very warm.
02:30And that certainly is going to have a life, or could have a lifelong impact on children.
02:35That 3 to 4 year old time period, a very important one for milestones and can have a large lifelong
02:39impact on well-being too.
02:41Yeah.
02:42And again, they found the areas where they're most susceptible to these issues, urban areas,
02:47areas with less access to clean water.
02:49It certainly seems like we find that a lot in a lot of studies that we cover here on this
02:53show is that lower socioeconomic status are disproportionately impacted by these impacts of climate change.
02:59Right.
03:00Spread for that insight.
03:01For other stories about climate, you can find that at AccuWeather.com slash climate.
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