Measuring the Burden of Climate-Related Asthma in Ireland via Microsimulation and Hybrid Costing

Asthma affects approximately 5.7% of EU citizens, with over 7.7% of Irish residents suffering from the condition. Climate change will significantly affect both the prevalence and severity of asthma via exposure to temporal stressors including fluctuating air quality, changing local vegetation patterns, and increasingly intense precipitation. Resulting asthma cases will result in significant additional costs and pressures on the healthcare sector, the magnitude of which however remains, to date, unclear. The current project will provide an econometric analysis of the public healthcare burden generated by climate-related asthma via a national longitudinal survey (n = 1,695) of asthma sufferers and semi-structured interviews with healthcare professionals. Current and future likely healthcare expenditures will be quantified using time-driven activity-based costing and microsimulation as a function of future demographic shifts and climate change scenarios. The indirect burden of climate-related effects will be calculated utilizing a hybrid set of physical, psychological, and economic burden-of-disease measures. Preliminary results indicate that asthma-related limitations on daily activities significantly impair males more than females (t = 2.937, p =.005), with decreases in quality of life significantly differing across age groups (F = 4.234, p =.003). The asthma-related toll on quality of life is further associated with presentation of adverse mental health effects including depression (r = -.301, p<.001) and anxiety (r = -.340, p<.001), indicating compounded physical and psychological health and economic susceptibilities within households with younger, male asthma patients. Findings will increase the current evidence-base for specific demographic groups across Ireland, enabling future budget allocation, surveillance, and healthcare management and providing a replicable model for surveillance of the economic burden of climate-related asthma across Europe. KEY MESSAGES: • The study will increase the evidence-base for budgetary allocation based on simulated health vulnerabilities and develop a baseline for research on climate-associated health outcomes. • The study will translate cross-sectoral health impacts into monetary “bottom lines” for elucidating health-related costs associated with specific climate change scenarios via hybrid costing.