Socioeconomic factors in the community fail to explain the high coronary mortality in cold parts of Sweden.

Abstract

A regional association between cold climate and coronary mortality in Sweden has already been described. This study aimed to investigate whether this association can be explained by differences in socioeconomic factors and found that there was a regional association between coronary mortality and the following socioeconomic factors: prevalence of manual workers (D = 0.22), unemployment rates (D = 0.19), and proportion of low income earners (D = 0.17). However, these associations were substantially weaker than that between cold climate and coronary mortality (D = 0.39), and when cold climate was introduced into the statistical model the explanatory power of the socioeconomic factors diminished substantially and only the percentage of manual workers enhanced the explanatory power of cold climate. Regional variation in coronary mortality could not be attributed to long distance to emergency hospital. To conclude, the strong association between cold climate and coronary mortality could not be attributed to the influence of socioeconomic factors.