Ben Armstrong
Biographic Data
| ID | 252992 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Ben Armstrong |
| GIVEN NAMES | Ben |
| FAMILY NAME | Armstrong |
| SIGNATURE | BEN ARMSTRONG |
| AFFILIATIONS | London School of Hygiene & Tropical Medicine |
| ORCID | 0000-0002-3354-4376 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 51 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 84 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 51 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 0 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 1982 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2025 |
| H-INDEX | 4 |
The effectiveness of heat prevention plans in reducing heat-related mortality across Europe
Heat-health warning systems and action plans, referred to as heat prevention plans (HPPs), are key public health interventions aimed at reducing heat-related mortality. Despite their importance, prior assessments of their effectiveness have yielded inconsistent results. The objective of this study is to systematically assess the effectiveness of HPPs in reducing heat-related mortality risk across Europe. We analysed daily mortality and mean tempe…
The Drug Crisis and Voting Behavior
In this paper, we explore the electoral consequences of the opioid epidemic in the United States, particularly its relationship with the Republican vote share in US presidential elections. We argue that the worsening opioid crisis is associated with a shift toward the Republican Party, and that these gains result from a decline in both Democratic support and voter abstention. We test these expectations using county-level presidential election res…
Estimating the urban heat-related mortality burden due to greenness
Choice Overload in Crowded Primary Elections
The number of candidates running in U.S. primary elections is increasing. Contested primary elections force voters to decide between candidates that share party labels and are ideologically similar. Similar to contexts of non-partisan elections, an increase in the number of candidates should exacerbate the cognitive demand of voting in primary elections. We expect large candidate fields in primaries make voters (1) spend less time looking at each…
Party Realignment, Education, and the Turnout Advantage
Party realignment is occurring along the lines of education in the United States. As college-educated voters increasingly align with the Democratic Party, it is necessary to revisit the partisan effect of turnout. We predict that, since 2016, the Democratic Party no longer benefits from higher turnout. Using validated voter turnout from the Cooperative Election Study (CES), we simulate election results across turnout rates for the 2010, 2012, 201…
Financial Crises and the Selection and Survival of Women Finance Ministers
Women remain underrepresented in cabinets, especially in high-prestige, "masculine" portfolios. Still, a growing number of states have appointed women to the finance ministry-a powerful position typically reserved for men. Drawing on the "glass cliff" phenomenon, we examine the relationship between financial crises and women's ascension to, and survival in, this post. With an original dataset on appointments to finance ministries worldwide (1972-…
Approaching Equality? Media Treatment of Male and Female Members of Presidential Cabinets in a Cross-Country Comparison
Generalizability of extant findings about media treatment of women in politics is uncertain because most research examines candidates for the legislature or heads of government, and little work moves beyond Anglo-American countries. We examine six presidential cabinets in Costa Rica, Uruguay, and the United States, which provide differing levels of women's incorporation into government. These cases permit us to test hypotheses arguing that differ…
Excess mortality attributed to heat and cold
BACKGROUND: Heat and cold are established environmental risk factors for human health. However, mapping the related health burden is a difficult task due to the complexity of the associations and the differences in vulnerability and demographic distributions. In this study, we did a comprehensive mortality impact assessment due to heat and cold in European urban areas, considering geographical differences and age-specific risks. METHODS: We inclu…
Absence of Street Lighting May Prevent Vehicle Crime, but Spatial and Temporal Displacement Remains a Concern
Supply Chains & Working Conditions During the Long Pandemic
In recent decades, the global economy has become increasingly structured around supply chains that connect firms within and across national borders, a reliance that has been the subject of controversy in light of disruptions from the COVID-19 pandemic. In response to these disruptions, firms have adapted in various ways to maintain their level of production. In this essay, we describe two approaches companies pursued during the pandemic: the “swe…
Corruption, Accountability, and Women’s Access to Power
Corruption is sustained by powerful male networks, reinforcing women’s exclusion from politics. Yet, contrary to this conventional wisdom, we theorize that corruption can sometimes increase women’s access to power. Since women are often perceived as “cleaner” than men, where institutions allow heads of government to be held accountable on economic issues, chief executives may use women’s inclusion in high-profile posts to signal that they are cur…
Global, regional, and national burden of mortality associated with non-optimal ambient temperatures from 2000 to 2019
BACKGROUND: Exposure to cold or hot temperatures is associated with premature deaths. We aimed to evaluate the global, regional, and national mortality burden associated with non-optimal ambient temperatures. METHODS: In this modelling study, we collected time-series data on mortality and ambient temperatures from 750 locations in 43 countries and five meta-predictors at a grid size of 0·5° × 0·5° across the globe. A three-stage analysis strategy…
The burden of heat-related mortality attributable to recent human-induced climate change
Climate change affects human health; however, there have been no large-scale, systematic efforts to quantify the heat-related human health impacts that have already occurred due to climate change. Here, we use empirical data from 732 locations in 43 countries to estimate the mortality burdens associated with the additional heat exposure that has resulted from recent human-induced warming, during the period 1991-2018. Across all study countries, w…
The English National Cohort Study of Flooding & Health
Flooding can have severe long-lasting consequences on mental health in affected populations. If these problems are not identified and treated early, they may persist for years. Further research is necessary to develop and evaluate interventions to increase resilience in at risk populations and to ensure timely access to support services following flooding
Effect of Insurance-Related Factors on the Association between Flooding and Mental Health Outcomes
Floods are a significant public health problem linked with increased psychological morbidity. We aimed to investigate the effect of insurance-related factors on the association between flooding and probable mental health outcomes. We performed a secondary analysis of cross-sectional survey data from the English National Study of Flooding and Health (NSFH) collected two years after an initial flooding event in 2013-14. Our analysis focused on 851 …
Quantifying excess deaths related to heatwaves under climate change scenarios
BACKGROUND: Heatwaves are a critical public health problem. There will be an increase in the frequency and severity of heatwaves under changing climate. However, evidence about the impacts of climate change on heatwave-related mortality at a global scale is limited. METHODS AND FINDINGS: We collected historical daily time series of mean temperature and mortality for all causes or nonexternal causes, in periods ranging from January 1, 1984, to Dec…
The English National Cohort Study of Flooding and Health
This study shows a continuance of probable psychological morbidity at least two years following exposure to flooding. Commissioners and providers of health and social care services should be aware that the increased need in populations may be prolonged. Efforts to resolve persistent damage to homes may reduce the risk of probable psychological morbidity
Investigating associations between the built environment and physical activity among older people in 20 UK towns
BACKGROUND: Policy initiatives such as WHO Age Friendly Cities recognise the importance of the urban environment for improving health of older people, who have both low physical activity (PA) levels and greater dependence on local neighbourhoods. Previous research in this age group is limited and rarely uses objective measures of either PA or the environment. METHODS: We investigated the association between objectively measured PA (Actigraph GT3x…
Heat Wave and Mortality
BACKGROUND: Few studies have examined variation in the associations between heat waves and mortality in an international context. OBJECTIVES: We aimed to systematically examine the impacts of heat waves on mortality with lag effects internationally. METHODS: We collected daily data of temperature and mortality from 400 communities in 18 countries/regions and defined 12 types of heat waves by combining community-specific daily mean temperature ≥90…
Projections of temperature-related excess mortality under climate change scenarios
BACKGROUND: Climate change can directly affect human health by varying exposure to non-optimal outdoor temperature. However, evidence on this direct impact at a global scale is limited, mainly due to issues in modelling and projecting complex and highly heterogeneous epidemiological relationships across different populations and climates. METHODS: We collected observed daily time series of mean temperature and mortality counts for all causes or n…
The English national cohort study of flooding and health
This study provides an insight into the impact of flooding on mental health, suggesting that the impacts of flooding are large, prolonged and extend beyond just those whose homes are flooded
Mental health impacts of flooding
BACKGROUND: There is emerging evidence that people affected by flooding suffer adverse impacts on their mental well-being, mostly based on self-reports. METHODS: We examined prescription records for drugs used in the management of common mental disorder among primary care practices located in the vicinity of recent large flood events in England, 2011-2014. A controlled interrupted time series analysis was conducted of the number of prescribing it…
Optimising measurement of health-related characteristics of the built environment
The role of the neighbourhood environment in influencing health behaviours continues to be an important topic in public health research and policy. Foot-based street audits, virtual street audits and secondary data sources are widespread data collection methods used to objectively measure the built environment in environment-health association studies. We compared these three methods using data collected in a nationally representative epidemiolog…
Mortality risk attributable to high and low ambient temperature
BACKGROUND: Although studies have provided estimates of premature deaths attributable to either heat or cold in selected countries, none has so far offered a systematic assessment across the whole temperature range in populations exposed to different climates. We aimed to quantify the total mortality burden attributable to non-optimum ambient temperature, and the relative contributions from heat and cold and from moderate and extreme temperatures…
Temporal Variation in Heat–Mortality Associations
BACKGROUND: Recent investigations have reported a decline in the heat-related mortality risk during the last decades. However, these studies are frequently based on modeling approaches that do not fully characterize the complex temperature-mortality relationship, and are limited to single cities or countries. OBJECTIVES: We assessed the temporal variation in heat-mortality associations in a multi-country data set using flexible modelling techniqu…
Corruption, Accountability, and Women’s Access to Power
Corruption is sustained by powerful male networks, reinforcing women’s exclusion from politics. Yet, contrary to this conventional wisdom, we theorize that corruption can sometimes increase women’s access to power. Since women are often perceived as “cleaner” than men, where institutions allow heads of government to be held accountable on economic issues, chief executives may use women’s inclusion in high-profile posts to signal that they are cur…
Financial Crises and the Selection and Survival of Women Finance Ministers
Women remain underrepresented in cabinets, especially in high-prestige, "masculine" portfolios. Still, a growing number of states have appointed women to the finance ministry-a powerful position typically reserved for men. Drawing on the "glass cliff" phenomenon, we examine the relationship between financial crises and women's ascension to, and survival in, this post. With an original dataset on appointments to finance ministries worldwide (1972-…
Cigarette, alcohol, and coffee consumption and prematurity
We analyzed data from a survey of occupational and other factors in pregnancy to assess the effects of cigarette, alcohol, and coffee consumption on pregnancy outcome. The risk of low birth weight for gestational age was found to increase substantially with smoking. Occasional consumers of alcohol had a slightly reduced risk relative to total abstainers. In more frequent drinkers, there was a small increase in risk. Risk increased slightly with c…
Optimising measurement of health-related characteristics of the built environment
The role of the neighbourhood environment in influencing health behaviours continues to be an important topic in public health research and policy. Foot-based street audits, virtual street audits and secondary data sources are widespread data collection methods used to objectively measure the built environment in environment-health association studies. We compared these three methods using data collected in a nationally representative epidemiolog…
The effect of reduced street lighting on road casualties and crime in England and Wales
BACKGROUND: Many local authorities in England and Wales have reduced street lighting at night to save money and reduce carbon emissions. There is no evidence to date on whether these reductions impact on public health. We quantified the effect of 4 street lighting adaptation strategies (switch off, part-night lighting, dimming and white light) on casualties and crime in England and Wales. METHODS: Observational study based on analysis of geograph…
Alternatives to randomisation in the evaluation of public-health interventions
BACKGROUND: In non-randomised evaluations of public-health interventions, statistical methods to control confounding will usually be required. We review approaches to the control of confounding and discuss issues in drawing causal inference from these studies. METHODS: Non-systematic review of literature and mathematical data-simulation. RESULTS: Standard stratification and regression techniques will often be appropriate, but propensity scores ma…
Heat–Health Warning Systems
Objectives. We compared the ability of several heat–health warning systems to predict days of heat-associated mortality using common data sets. Methods. Heat–health warning systems initiate emergency public health interventions once forecasts have identified weather conditions to breach predetermined trigger levels. We examined 4 commonly used trigger-setting approaches: (1) synoptic classification, (2) epidemiologic assessment of the temperature…
Cigarette, alcohol, and coffee consumption and spontaneous abortion
We analyzed data from a survey of occupational factors and pregnancy outcome to examine the effects of cigarette, alcohol, and coffee consumption on pregnancy outcome. Clear and statistically significant associations were found between cigarette and alcohol consumption and spontaneous abortion. There was a weaker but statistically significant association with coffee consumption: If the associations were casual, 11% of the spontaneous abortions co…
Estimating the urban heat-related mortality burden due to greenness
Mental health impacts of flooding
BACKGROUND: There is emerging evidence that people affected by flooding suffer adverse impacts on their mental well-being, mostly based on self-reports. METHODS: We examined prescription records for drugs used in the management of common mental disorder among primary care practices located in the vicinity of recent large flood events in England, 2011-2014. A controlled interrupted time series analysis was conducted of the number of prescribing it…
Approaching Equality? Media Treatment of Male and Female Members of Presidential Cabinets in a Cross-Country Comparison
Generalizability of extant findings about media treatment of women in politics is uncertain because most research examines candidates for the legislature or heads of government, and little work moves beyond Anglo-American countries. We examine six presidential cabinets in Costa Rica, Uruguay, and the United States, which provide differing levels of women's incorporation into government. These cases permit us to test hypotheses arguing that differ…
Supply Chains & Working Conditions During the Long Pandemic
In recent decades, the global economy has become increasingly structured around supply chains that connect firms within and across national borders, a reliance that has been the subject of controversy in light of disruptions from the COVID-19 pandemic. In response to these disruptions, firms have adapted in various ways to maintain their level of production. In this essay, we describe two approaches companies pursued during the pandemic: the “swe…
Investigating associations between the built environment and physical activity among older people in 20 UK towns
BACKGROUND: Policy initiatives such as WHO Age Friendly Cities recognise the importance of the urban environment for improving health of older people, who have both low physical activity (PA) levels and greater dependence on local neighbourhoods. Previous research in this age group is limited and rarely uses objective measures of either PA or the environment. METHODS: We investigated the association between objectively measured PA (Actigraph GT3x…
Association of mortality with high temperatures in a temperate climate
BACKGROUND: It is well known that high ambient temperatures are associated with increased mortality, even in temperate climates, but some important details are unclear. In particular, how heat-mortality associations (for example, slopes and thresholds) vary by climate has previously been considered only qualitatively. METHODS: An ecological time-series regression analysis of daily counts of all-cause mortality and ambient temperature in summers b…
Acute lymphoblastic leukaemia among Spanish children and mothers' occupation
STUDY OBJECTIVE--The aim was to investigate the association between mothers' occupational exposure during pregnancy and the incidence of acute lymphoblastic leukaemia in children. DESIGN--The study was a case-control investigation. A face to face interview was used to assess exposures at work and relevant confounding variables. SETTING--The study was community based and was carried out in five provinces of Spain. SUBJECTS--128 cases less than 15 …
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Acute lymphoblastic leukaemia among Spanish children and mothers' occupation
STUDY OBJECTIVE--The aim was to investigate the association between mothers' occupational exposure during pregnancy and the incidence of acute lymphoblastic leukaemia in children. DESIGN--The study was a case-control investigation. A face to face interview was used to assess exposures at work and relevant confounding variables. SETTING--The study was community based and was carried out in five provinces of Spain. SUBJECTS--128 cases less than 15 …
Cigarette, alcohol, and coffee consumption and spontaneous abortion
We analyzed data from a survey of occupational factors and pregnancy outcome to examine the effects of cigarette, alcohol, and coffee consumption on pregnancy outcome. Clear and statistically significant associations were found between cigarette and alcohol consumption and spontaneous abortion. There was a weaker but statistically significant association with coffee consumption: If the associations were casual, 11% of the spontaneous abortions co…
Cigarette, alcohol, and coffee consumption and congenital defects
We analyzed data from a survey of occupational and other factors and pregnancy outcome to assess the effects of cigarette, alcohol, and coffee consumption. There was no evidence of an association between any congenital defect and smoking. Results for alcohol and coffee consumption were largely negative, but there was a weak association with musculoskeletal defects in babies born to women who drank one or more alcoholic drinks a day
Cigarette, alcohol, and coffee consumption and prematurity
We analyzed data from a survey of occupational and other factors in pregnancy to assess the effects of cigarette, alcohol, and coffee consumption on pregnancy outcome. The risk of low birth weight for gestational age was found to increase substantially with smoking. Occasional consumers of alcohol had a slightly reduced risk relative to total abstainers. In more frequent drinkers, there was a small increase in risk. Risk increased slightly with c…
The social impact of a national information superhighway
article The social impact of a national information superhighway Share on Author: Ben Armstrong The University of Melbourne Parkville, Victoria, Australia The University of Melbourne Parkville, Victoria, AustraliaView Profile Authors Info & Claims ACM SIGCAS Computers and SocietyVolume 25Issue 3Sept. 1995 pp 10–14https://doi.org/10.1145/211973.211982Online:01 September 1995Publication History 1citation222DownloadsMetricsTotal Citations1Total Down…
La salud de mujeres que viven cerca de pozos y estaciones de petróleo en la Amazonía ecuatoriana
The symptoms found among the participants in the exposed communities match the toxicity symptoms caused by oil. There is an urgent need to establish an adequate environmental control and remediation program in order to prevent unnecessary and unacceptable health hazards for these populations
Mortality Displacement of Heat-Related Deaths
BACKGROUND: Mortality increases with hot weather, although the extent to which lives are shortened is rarely quantified. We compare the extent to which short-term mortality displacement can explain heat deaths in Delhi, São Paulo, and London given contrasting demographic and health profiles. METHODS: We examined time-series of daily mortality data in relation to daily ambient temperature using Poisson models and adjusting for season, relative hum…
Models for the Relationship Between Ambient Temperature and Daily Mortality
BACKGROUND: Ambient temperature is an important determinant of daily mortality that is of interest both in its own right and as a confounder of other determinants investigated using time-series regressions, in particular, air pollution. The temperature-mortality relationship is often found to be substantially nonlinear and to persist (but change shape) with increasing lag. We review and extend models for such nonlinear multilag forms. DEVELOPMENT…
Impact of High Temperatures on Mortality
BACKGROUND: Mortality during sustained periods of hot weather is generally regarded as being in excess of what would be predicted from smooth temperature-mortality gradients estimated using standard time-series regression models. However, the evidence for an effect of continuous days of exceptional heat ("heat wave effect") is indirect. In addition, because some interventions may be triggered only during forecasted heat waves, it would be helpful…
Outdoor air pollution and infant mortality
Background: There is growing concern that moderate levels of outdoor air pollution may be associated with infant mortality, representing substantial loss of life-years. To date, there has been no investigation of the effects of outdoor pollution on infant mortality in the UK. Methods: Daily time-series data of air pollution and all infant deaths between 1990 and 2000 in 10 major cities of England: Birmingham, Bristol, Leeds, Liverpool, London, Ma…
International study of temperature, heat and urban mortality
BACKGROUND: This study describes heat- and cold-related mortality in 12 urban populations in low- and middle-income countries, thereby extending knowledge of how diverse populations, in non-OECD countries, respond to temperature extremes. METHODS: The cities were: Delhi, Monterrey, Mexico City, Chiang Mai, Bangkok, Salvador, São Paulo, Santiago, Cape Town, Ljubljana, Bucharest and Sofia. For each city, daily mortality was examined in relation to …
Public health benefits of strategies to reduce greenhouse-gas emissions
Public health benefits of strategies to reduce greenhouse-gas emissions
Public health benefits of strategies to reduce greenhouse-gas emissions
Distributed lag non‐linear models
Environmental stressors often show effects that are delayed in time, requiring the use of statistical models that are flexible enough to describe the additional time dimension of the exposure–response relationship. Here we develop the family of distributed lag non‐linear models (DLNM), a modelling framework that can simultaneously represent non‐linear exposure–response dependencies and delayed effects. This methodology is based on the definition …
Heat–Health Warning Systems
Objectives. We compared the ability of several heat–health warning systems to predict days of heat-associated mortality using common data sets. Methods. Heat–health warning systems initiate emergency public health interventions once forecasts have identified weather conditions to breach predetermined trigger levels. We examined 4 commonly used trigger-setting approaches: (1) synoptic classification, (2) epidemiologic assessment of the temperature…
The Impact of Heat Waves on Mortality
BACKGROUND: Heat waves have been linked with an increase in mortality, but the associated risk has been only partly characterized. METHODS: We examined this association by decomposing the risk for temperature into a "main effect" due to independent effects of daily high temperatures, and an "added" effect due to sustained duration of heat during waves, using data from 108 communities in the United States during 1987-2000. We adopted different def…
Alternatives to randomisation in the evaluation of public-health interventions
BACKGROUND: In non-randomised evaluations of public-health interventions, statistical methods to control confounding will usually be required. We review approaches to the control of confounding and discuss issues in drawing causal inference from these studies. METHODS: Non-systematic review of literature and mathematical data-simulation. RESULTS: Standard stratification and regression techniques will often be appropriate, but propensity scores ma…
Association of mortality with high temperatures in a temperate climate
BACKGROUND: It is well known that high ambient temperatures are associated with increased mortality, even in temperate climates, but some important details are unclear. In particular, how heat-mortality associations (for example, slopes and thresholds) vary by climate has previously been considered only qualitatively. METHODS: An ecological time-series regression analysis of daily counts of all-cause mortality and ambient temperature in summers b…
Multivariate meta‐analysis for non‐linear and other multi‐parameter associations
In this paper, we formalize the application of multivariate meta‐analysis and meta‐regression to synthesize estimates of multi‐parameter associations obtained from different studies. This modelling approach extends the standard two‐stage analysis used to combine results across different sub‐groups or populations. The most straightforward application is for the meta‐analysis of non‐linear relationships, described for example by regression coeffici…
Mortality on extreme heat days using official thresholds in Spain
This study confirmed that extreme heat days have a considerable impact on total daily mortality in Spain. Official thresholds gave consistent relative risk in the large capital cities. However, in some other cities thresholds
Time series regression studies in environmental epidemiology
Time series regression studies have been widely used in environmental epidemiology, notably in investigating the short-term associations between exposures such as air pollution, weather variables or pollen, and health outcomes such as mortality, myocardial infarction or disease-specific hospital admissions. Typically, for both exposure and outcome, data are available at regular time intervals (e.g. daily pollution levels and daily mortality count…
Reducing and meta-analysing estimates from distributed lag non-linear models
BACKGROUND: The two-stage time series design represents a powerful analytical tool in environmental epidemiology. Recently, models for both stages have been extended with the development of distributed lag non-linear models (DLNMs), a methodology for investigating simultaneously non-linear and lagged relationships, and multivariate meta-analysis, a methodology to pool estimates of multi-parameter associations. However, the application of both met…
Global Variation in the Effects of Ambient Temperature on Mortality
BACKGROUND: Studies have examined the effects of temperature on mortality in a single city, country, or region. However, less evidence is available on the variation in the associations between temperature and mortality in multiple countries, analyzed simultaneously. METHODS: We obtained daily data on temperature and mortality in 306 communities from 12 countries/regions (Australia, Brazil, Thailand, China, Taiwan, Korea, Japan, Italy, Spain, Unit…
Medicine (31 works) · Climate Change and Health Impacts (27 works) · Demography (25 works) · Environmental health (23 works) · Geography (21 works) · Statistics (17 works) · Mathematics (16 works) · Thermal Regulation in Medicine (15 works) · Air Quality and Health Impacts (13 works) · Environmental Science (13 works)