International Journal of Public Health

As the IJPH Blog will soon take a holiday, we’d thought we leave you with a small collection of articles related to summer and heat!

- A review on Public health impact of global heating due to climate change: potential effects on chronic non-communicable diseases by Professor  Tord Kjellstrom and colleagues, which reviews available evidence and emphasizes the research gaps in this area

- A study by Professor Inés Gómez-Acebo and colleagues, exploring the relationship between extreme temperatures and mortality in Spain

- A study exploring the effect of temperature on hospital admissions in 9 California counties, conducted by Rochelle Green and colleagues and concluding that increases in temperature have important public health impact on morbidity

- A  survey on awareness and practices of health professionals on minimizing harm from heatwaves in Australia, conducted by Professor Joseph E Ibrahim and colleagues

- Α brief report by Sumi Hoshiko and colleagues, outlining a method for estimating excess mortality due to heat waves

We hope tha you will find these articles interesting! Let us know what you think and have a great and safe summer!

We are happy to announce the online publication of a study on the change of the socioeconomic gradient in health-related behaviour in adolescents in Slovakia. This article is written by Lukas Pitel,  Andrea Madarasova Geckova,  Sijmen A. Reijneveld and Jitse P. van Dijk and is published with Open Access, which means you can download it for free in html or pdf format!

The study, entitled “Socioeconomic gradient shifts in health-related behaviour among Slovak adolescents between 1998 and 2006″ collected data on smoking, alcohol consumption and physical activity from Slovak adolescents in 1998 and 2006 using similar methodologies.

The authors report that the socioeconomic differences in smoking decreased among boys but increased among girls, with girls coming from low socioeconomic background smoking more.

The socioeconomic differences in alcohol consumption disappeared among girls, while their absence persisted among boys.

Looking at physical activity, the socioeconomic differences increased among boys while the small differences that had been originally observed among girls disappeared.

Go ahea and download the study! Feel free to share it with your colleagues and let us know what you think!